The mitoGENE risk for psychiatric diseases: From French cohorts to Canadian mitochondrial expertise

Mental disorders make up 25.3% and 33.5% of all years lived with a disability in low-and middle-income countries, respectively (WHO). Mental illness and mental health problems cost the Canadian economy $51 billion annually in healthcare costs, lost productivity, and reduced quality of life (Canadian Mental Health Association). This socioeconomic burden is partly due to the misdiagnosis and treatments that are only efficient on subgroups of patients. In this line, the project will allow the development of a supplementary tool for diagnostic and patient stratification: the MitoGene Risk Score. Mitochondria are organelles known to generate cellular ATP through oxidative phosphorylation, and have been implicated in numerous psychiatric disorders. Since those disorders have an important genetic background, we propose a ground-breaking method: the convolutional neural network-based mitochondrial polygenic risk scores.

Faculty Supervisor:

Ana Andreazza

Student:

Partner:

Institut Mondor de Recherche Biomédicale

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Toronto

Program: