Approved Research

Combining NMR metabolomics and data-analytics to explore the biochemical basis of schizophrenia pathophysiology

Lay summary

Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychotic disorder that affects 1% of the global population. Currently, no laboratory tests are available to specifically diagnose schizophrenia. Psychiatrists perform the diagnosis and later prognosis of patients based on symptoms as outlined in international medical guidelines such as ICD-10, which is proposed by the World Health Organization.

The biggest bottle neck in such a complex disease are the unknown factors and the interplay of them, which include mental, physical, genetic and environmental conditions. Therefore, many a scientist, including us, apply functional genomics approaches such as metabolomics and proteomics to understand the molecular mechanisms of the disorders. The strength of functional genomics lies in the fact that the technology can be applied to describe how the individual components of a biological system work together to define an individual. In this manner, when one can analyze data from subjects and compare it with healthy controls from a population of people. Based on the differences between the two groups, one is in a better position to identify relevant biological cues for the disorder. For this purpose, we are approaching the UKbiobank requesting access to their data so that we can annotate and quantify for biochemicals that are present in the blood (plasma) samples. This will be followed by performing statistical analysis to identify key reported molecules and the biochemical pathways that are malfunctioning in the disorder.

In the next step, we will extend our approach from identifying the biomolecules to applying the findings to develop diagnostic kits. The need of the hour is a reliable molecular diagnostic tool that can aid the psychiatrists with rapid diagnosis of the diseases. tics along with machine learning approaches to characterize the heterogeneous combination of symptoms observed in schizophrenia over the traditional diagnostic approaches that have proven to be less-effective. To meet our objectives, we perceive a minimum of 36 months and up to 60 months for successful implementation of the project.