Columbia University, an Institutional Founding Member of the New York Genome Center (NYGC), recently announced the Center for Precision Psychiatry & Mental Health funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
The SNF Center is a collaboration between the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Columbia’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. The Center will draw upon expertise from NYGC and the New York State Office of Mental Health to accelerate the Genomic Medicine for Mental Health Advancement (GeMMA) initiative, which is one of the major projects under the new Center through joint efforts between the NYGC and Columbia.
“The GeMMA initiative will not only provide essential information for individual patients, it will also build upon and expand pioneering work at Columbia University central to establishing ‘causal’ relationships between genetic variation and brain function, which is a critical step in the development of new approaches to diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental illness,” said Tom Maniatis, PhD, Evnin Family Scientific Director and CEO of the NYGC and Isidore Edelman Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia.
