BD²: Breakthrough Discoveries for Thriving with Bipolar Disorder has announced $15 million in grants in support of bipolar disorder genetics research.

The funder’s inaugural grants will support the creation of the BD² Genetics Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the New York Genome Center. The three institutions will sequence more than 30,000 genetic samples from people with bipolar disorder from Africa, Central America, South America, and Asia. In addition, the grants will support the launch of the BD² Brain Omics Platform to study human brain tissue from people who lived with bipolar disorder. The platform will be launched by the CommonMind Consortium, which includes the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the University of Pittsburgh, and the California Institute of Technology. 

The two efforts aim to accelerate discovery and improve diagnosis and care for the more than 40 million people with bipolar disorder. The Omics and Genetics teams will work closely with the scientific advisory committees, other funded teams, and the philanthropic investors to ensure their work transforms the field for people with bipolar disorder.

“This state-of-the-art approach will aid in understanding neural changes in bipolar disorder on a molecular scale, an approach used in other brain disorders but is unprecedented in bipolar disorder studies,” said Panos Roussos, director of the Center for Disease Neurogenomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. 

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