KFO 241: Genotype-Phenotype Relationships and Neurobiology of the Longitudinal Course of Psychosis
Final Report Abstract
Psychiatric genetic research has represented an important focus of postwar biological psychiatry in Germany since the 1990s. German groups have been instrumental in establishing large study collectives and pioneering analyses in recent decades and have leadership roles within the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC). Within the last decade, calls have been made in Germany, as well as internationally, for increased embedding of psychiatric genetic research within the larger context of psychiatric research. The implementation of such a concept was the basic idea behind the submission of the application for the establishment of a Clinical Research Unit, with the process aspect being the pivotal point of the application. The Clinical Research Unit (KFO) was established at the University Medical Center Göttingen on January 1, 2012, and ran there until December 31, 2014. Due to the appointments of Peter Falkai, Moritz Rossner, and Thomas G. Schulze at the LMU Munich, the research unit was further funded in a different composition and form (individual applications as part of a package application) as a site-distributed PsyCourse project (www.PsyCourse.de). The original mission of the KFO, the establishment of a longitudinal cohort of patients with severe mental disorders from the psychosis spectrum as an infrastructural measure for comprehensive biological course research in psychiatry, was strengthened rather than weakened by this site distribution, since recruitment could now be increasingly extended to the southern German region. The KFO/PsyCourse project has built up one of the world's largest resources for biological psychiatric research in the period 2011-2019 (2011: establishment of the medical informatics infrastructure as well as the biobank platform from budgetary funds; 2018 and 2019 continuation of recruitment, quality assurance measures in the context of cost-neutral extensions). The last subject was enrolled on 12/31/2019. Across the two funding phases (KFO and PsyCourse), many of the areas outlined above have been implemented in terms of content and personnel. This multicenter project has created a multicenter recruitment network, unique in Germany, as well as the first longitudinal biobank for psychiatric disorders. This resource as well as its infrastructure is described in detail in the publications mentioned below. The clinical psychosis cohort represented the central KFO/PsyCourse resource. Since the establishment of such a cohort was absolutely new territory, a comprehensive phenotype and biobank infrastructure as well as a multicenter recruitment network were first established with the support of the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) and the state of Lower Saxony in collaboration with the medical informatics department of the UMG. On January 1, 2012, it was then possible to start enrolling the first subjects. While in the first funding period the individual project partners mainly conducted their own projects, i.e. without direct use of the cohort, this was a decisive element in the second funding period, which can also be seen in the increasing cross-project publication activity during the course (http://www.psycourse.de/publications-en.php). In the initial stages, this cross-project scientific activity was essentially facilitated by regular meetings of the participating scientists. For almost three years, the KFO/PsyCourse project has pursued an Internet-based open science approach to share scientific experiences or initiate collaborations both among the individual groups and with research groups worldwide (http://www.psycourse.de/openscience-en.html).
