PhenoChipping
“Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems”- Larry Page, Google
Another line of our research involves the study of phenotypes (known as "phenomics").
The imprecise nature of psychiatric phenotypes is a rate-limiting step for general clinical research and practice (particularly in psychiatric genetics). Dr. Niculescu and collaborators have developed an approach -termed "PhenoChipping" - that applies microarray paradigms and methodology to the empirical study of phenotypes.
On-going work in this area is focused on major psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety disorders). We are building a bank of blood samples from PhenoChipped subjects for repeated mining by concurrent studies integrating genetic and genomics with phenomics.
We are particularly interested in the practical applications of this approach to biomarkers discovery, drug clinical trials and improved clinical practice- personalized medicine in psychiatry.