Schizophrenia

Genizon has completed a genome-wide association study in its schizophrenia program using 516 cases and matched controls from the Quebec Founder Population (QFP). The samples were individually genotyped using 317,504 tag SNPs supplemented with 56,683 SNPs tailored to the linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure of the QFP. Genome-wide haplotype case-control association analyses were carried out using proprietary software and genome-wide statistical significance was assessed using a permutation-based approach.

Regions with P values that met the criteria for genome-wide significance were identified both with the haplotype and single marker association tests. Additional regions were identified from data mining. The candidate regions are genetically well resolved with many containing only 1 or 2 genes. A GeneMap consisting of networks of interacting disease genes and their biochemical pathways was inferred, revealing both known and novel pathways.