VIRTUAL : Building and applying multi-modal brain cell taxonomies to alleviate the burden of neuropsychiatric illnesses

In this talk, I’ll discuss my lab’s work that uses single-cell genomics to define the cell types relevant to human neuropsychiatric disease. I will also talk about our progress and approaches for applying this knowledge towards the development of new therapies and diagnostic strategies.  

 First, I will talk about my lab’s collaborative work to develop a multi-modal atlas of the pig dorsal root ganglion that leverages Patch-seq and single-nucleus RNAseq. I will share our progress towards using this atlas to identify a specific physiologically-defined cell type of relevance towards chronic pain. Second, I will share our work defining the cell type-specific gene expression signatures of multiple neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. Lastly, I will share our work to identify vulnerable cell types across multiple neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders by leveraging single-cell genomics and bulk tissue deconvolution. I will outline how we plan to use this information towards developing in vivo biomarkers of cell type specific vulnerability and how we aim to use this knowledge in the context of novel therapies for neuropsychiatric illness.