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How A Giant Act Of Philanthropy May Kickstart Psychiatry

This article is more than 9 years old.

Positron emission tomography image of a human brain. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If scientists ever decipher the complex biology behind diseases like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression, a lot of the credit may go to a few deep-pocketed philanthropists and the money they’ve poured into the tiny stretch along the Charles River in Cambridge between Harvard and MIT.

In 2007, Ted Stanley, who amassed a fortune selling sports collectibles, got a call from Ed Scolnick, who had just finished a run as the head of research and development at Merck and headed to the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute to work on psychiatry research. Scolnick wanted money to fund a small project.

Stanley replied that he wanted to do something far bigger. He’d watched his son, Jonathan, struggle with bipolar disorder, respond to treatment, and carve out a life as a successful lawyer. He knew that many other patients were not so lucky and did not respond to treatment.

He and Scolnick hatched a plan in which Stanley donated $100 million to create the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute. Later, he gave another $50 million. Late last night, the Broad announced that Stanley, now 83, would give another $650 million, some of it to be bequeathed after his death.

“After I’m gone,” Stanley told The New York Times, “I just want the money to flow to them as it would if I was still alive."

Stanley’s $800 million comes on top of another huge act of philanthropy – the one that created the Broad Institute, which is named after Eli Broad, the billionaire founder of SunAmerica and KB Home, and his wife, Edythe. That created one of the world’s biggest powerhouses when it comes to the study of DNA and how it affects the way biology works, including its impact on human health.

A total of $1.6 billion might seem like a pittance given the $50 billion spent on R&D annually by drug companies or the $30 billion spent by the National Institutes of Health. But researchers at the Broad say it has allowed them to work on big projects that they couldn’t even think of getting grants for. Pharmaceutical companies have mostly fled psychiatry after a string of expensive failures. For instance a drug from Scolnick’s days at Merck that looked like a promising antidepressant instead turned out to be useful only for chemotherapy induced nausea, and Eli Lilly, for years the top maker of psychiatry drugs, has seen its attempts to create a new schizophrenia drug founder.

“Ted’s gift is indeed magnificent, but lots more is going to be needed,” says Eric Lander, the Broad’s founder and chairman. “It’s going to take a coalition of government funders. It’s going to take a generation.”

But the Broad timed its announcement to a paper that demonstrates the real progress that is being made. For years scientists were dismayed that ever-larger studies that used devices called DNA microarrays to look at thousands of points in the genome in thousands of people were failing to give strong evidence of genes that were linked to mental illness.

Apparently, the studies that had been done up until now were too small. A study of 36,989 patients with schizophrenia and 113,075 control subjects has found 108 regions of DNA that appear linked to the disease. In many cases, researchers have narrowed the results to a single gene, meaning they can start to figure out its function. The results appear to match up with an earlier study in which the researchers sequenced all the DNA of some patients. Some of the genes are related to nerve cells are the brain, but some are surprises, including some that seem to have a function in the immune system.

“Having philanthropy allows us to take thoughtful risk,” says Steven Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who now runs the Stanley Center. “If you’re writing a grant you’d write on one cell line or one mouse. We’re fortunate and I feel enormous weight of responsibility to get this right.”

Instead of having 108 labs work independently on each gene by studying them individually in mice, he’s going to follow a parallel approach, studying them all in mice and also using new technologies that allow scientists to create and genetically edit stem cells to see how genetic changes affect neurons in a dish.

Another key step will be doing DNA sequencing at a scale that was until now unimaginable, looking at all the DNA of patients with schizophrenia to try and understand what biology causes their disease using machines made by DNA sequencer-maker Illumina . In one fascinating and surprising finding, studies are finding that many of the same genes may be involved in autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder.

“As the tools have gotten good enough to say, sure, we’re going to sequence, 10,000, 20,000, or 30,000 people you can finally do what we’ve all known is the right thing to do all along which is to squeeze all the information we can out of human patients,” says Lander.

The progress has not completely escaped the notice of the drug industry. Novartis has a collaboration with the Broad to look at psychiatric disease, and is doing its own work with using stem cells created from patients with schizophrenia and other diseases to explore what might be going wrong in their brains.