The grant establishes a research center, the Conte Center, which will facilitate a collaborative effort between four major universities to research brain development from the prenatal stage through early adulthood.
The center is the 20th nationally to be established in memory of former U.S. Congressman Silvio Conte who was an advocate of research for brain disease.
The center will combine the efforts of experts from adult and child psychiatry, medical genetics, obstetrics and gynecology, neonatology, radiology, computer science and biostatistics.
Experts from UNC, Duke University, Harvard University and the University of Washington will collaborate on four interrelated projects relating to brain development and schizophrenia, said John Gilmore, a UNC psychiatry professor and co-principal investigator of the study.
UNC principal investigator Jeffrey Lieberman said in a statement that, "The essential and distinctive aspect of this center is that it unites the intellectual resources of four great universities and the expertise of individuals from diverse scientific disciplines."
Schizophrenia, the name given to a group of disabling psychotic illnesses, affects one in every 100 people and is passed down 10 percent of the time from a schizophrenic parent to child. The disorder, though treatable, is neither curable nor preventable, and its cause is unknown.
The center will engage in four interrelated studies on brain development in an attempt to learn more about the causes and early warning signs of schizophrenia.
The first study will concentrate on prenatal and neonatal brain development of children with schizophrenic mothers. Using ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging technologies, investigators will study the brain structure of the children from the second trimester of pregnancy until they are two weeks old, Gilmore said. After that, children will be assessed by standardized tests about language and motor development, as well as memory and attention.
The remaining three projects include post mortem studies of normal adolescent brain tissue, examinations of brain functions of adolescents and young adults at a high risk for developing schizophrenia, and a lab project studying early brain development in mice.
