By GREGORY ZELLER //
Backed by a multimillion-dollar federal grant, a seasoned Long Island-based behavioral scientist is taking the fight to nefarious neuropsychiatric disorders, once again.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded a five-year, $3.1 million grant to the Manhasset-based Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, where Institute of Behavioral Science Professor Todd Lencz while dive deep into cognitive defects – the brain-based impairments in memory, reasoning and planning behind some of society’s most dangerous and widespread psychiatric dysfunctions.
Building on Lencz’s prior NIH-funded cognitive-genomics research, Feinstein Institutes researchers will leverage data compiled by the Cognitive Genomics Consortium, a collaborative international effort designed to study the molecular genetics of cognitive function.
The COGENT dataset will give Lencz and friends access to large-scale studies of cognitive performance, neuroimaging and genetics – basically, the sum of modern science’s knowledge about Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, the autism spectrum, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and related dysfunctions.
Todd Lencz: Critical new insights.
Their five-year mission: further scientific understanding of – and develop new treatments for – these neuropsychiatric conditions, which claim the lives of 500,000 Americans annually, according to the World Health Organization.
Lencz – whose previous studies, including his recent Cognitive Genomics as a Window on Neurodevelopment and Psychopathology, led directly to this new funding – said the continuing mission is crucial to eventually cracking the code of numerous cognitive dysfunctions.
“Studying cognitive abnormalities is crucial for understanding psychiatric disorders,” the professor noted. “Our ongoing research will use our extensive genomics repositories to uncover new insights into treatment targets, biological mechanisms and biomarkers.”
Specifically, the new research will focus on more diverse subject groups, aiming to pinpoint essential cognitive areas, integrate the latest brain-imaging data and create new, biologically informed “polygenic risk scores.”
Lencz – an internationally renowned geneticist who in 2021 earned a $2.9 million NIH grant to study future-disease risk factors associated with in vitro fertilization procedures – has been published in more than a dozen respected scientific journals, including Nature Genetics, Nature Human Behaviour and the American Journal of Psychiatry.
And the professor – an expert in genetic factors affecting schizophrenia drugs, neural signatures that can predict antipsychotic-treatment responses and dozens of similar topics – is the perfect man to lead these ongoing neuropsychiatric studies, according to Feinstein Institutes President and CEO Kevin Tracey.
“Dr. Lencz’s research aims to enhance our understanding of the genetic influences on a range of mental health disorders,” Tracey said in a statement. “The recent NIH grant will … potentially pave the way for the development of therapeutics to address these disorders and enhance quality of life.”
