The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has announced a $100 million gift from the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, for a new research center that will combine the strengths of genomics and chemical biology to advance the understanding and treatment of severe mental illnesses.

The gift, the largest ever given to an institution for psychiatric disease research, will support the creation of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and fund existing and new programs over the next decade. The center is an outgrowth of the Broad Institute's Psychiatric Disease Initiative, which was launched by physician-scientist Edward Scolnick, who will direct the new center. Based at the Broad Institute, the interdisciplinary center will bring together scientists from diverse fields and institutions to pursue collaborative projects, building on the institute's current psychiatric disease research.

"Psychiatric disease is an enormous research challenge because you can't study it in cell culture like cancer or measure it with a blood test like diabetes," said Broad Institute director Eric S. Lander. "Psychiatric disease may be the most important application for genomics. Genomic tools can help uncover the molecular mechanisms of the disease, which is essential knowledge for developing therapeutics. The Stanley gift is a crucial step toward that goal."