Another line of work involves the study of phenotypes- phenomics. The imprecise nature of psychiatric phenotypes has been a rate-limiting step for clinical research and practice in general, and for psychiatric genetics in particular. Dr. Niculescu and collaborators have developed an approach, termed PhenoChipping, that applies microarray paradigms and methodology to the empirical study of phenotypes. Ongoing work in this area is focused on major psychotic disorders (schizophrenia, schizoaffective, bipolar). We are particularly interested in building a bank of blood samples from the subjects that are PhenoChipped, for repeated mining by studies integrating genetic and genomics with the phenomics. We are also interested in the practical application of this approach to pharmacogenomics and drug clinical trials. This work has resulted in one publication.
