A multi-species approach to unlock the disease and treatment mechanisms of obsessive-compulsive disorder: Expansion of the World’s largest biobank for novel genomic studies

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a serious and heritable (~40-50%) psychiatric disorder that causes enormous personal and societal costs.

After decades of molecular genetic research with no replicable results, gene discovery for OCD is just beginning to be realized. The main factor that has driven progress is greatly increasing sample size.

Our group has played a major role in this effort, thanks to recently completed funding from the Swedish Research Council (project number 2015-02271) that allowed us to create the world’s largest OCD DNA biobank (current N > 3,500 cases).

However, in order for OCD gene discovery to accelerate and reach a point where genetic findings may be clinically useful, the sample collection must be expanded even further.

Here, we propose to expand our OCD biobank by adding 5,000 cases and 250 trios, which will markedly increase power for the identification of both common and rare genetic variants that confer risk for OCD. We also propose two novel analyses of these OCD genomic data.

The first will involve a cross-species genomic meta-analysis using a plausible animal model of OCD: canine compulsive disorder. The second will involve examining the effect of genetic risk for OCD on treatment response.

Overall, the expansion of our OCD biobank and these novel analyses will greatly enhance our ability to identify OCD risk genes and will make future epigenetic, biomarker, and personalised medicine studies possible.