PGC IC-Magic
India Consortium on Mental illness And Genetics In the Clinic
It is estimated that nearly 200 million persons living in India are affected by a mental illness (National Mental Health Survey, The Lancet, 2020). These illnesses have exceptionally high morbidity, mortality, and personal/societal costs. Understanding the pathological basis of these illnesses has proved to be very challenging. Several worldwide initiatives have attempted to study the genetic basis of these syndrome.
The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (https://www.med.unc.edu/pgc/) (abbreviated PGC) is an international consortium of scientists dedicated to conducting meta- and mega-analyses of genomic-wide genetic data, with a focus on psychiatric disorders. It is the largest psychiatric consortium ever created, including over 800 researchers from 38 countries as of 2019. Its goal is to generate information about the genetics of psychiatric conditions that will be “actionable”, that is, “genetic findings whose biological implications can be used to improve diagnosis, develop rational therapeutics, and craft mechanistic approaches to primary prevention”
The Indian Consortium on Mental Illness and Genetics in the Clinic (IC-MAGIC) is a collaborative network of psychiatrists and scientists across India, who aim to investigate the genetic architecture of severe mental illnesses in people of Indian descent, a population that has been under-represented in existing genetics studies.
IC-MAGIC, with the guidance of experts from the PGC, aims to establish the expertise and infrastructure to conduct large-scale genetic studies of severe mental illnesses across the sub-continent of India using state of the art methods, and it will leverage this infrastructure to carry out a first of its kind genetics study of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder at a scale that modern genetic studies require and not previously feasible in India.
Map of Collaborating Centers
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NIMHANS, Bangalore |