CommonMind Consortium Expands Public-Private Effort to Generate and Broadly Share Molecular Data on Neuropsychiatric Disease

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The CommonMind Consortium (CMC), launched in April 2012, is pleased to announce that its membership has expanded to include five academic groups (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai - MS; University of Pennsylvania – Penn; National Institute of Mental Health – NIMH; University of Pittsburgh – Pitt; and University of Texas Southwestern – UTSW), two pharmaceutical companies (Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Limited – TAKEDA; and F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd – Roche) and one nonprofit group (Sage Bionetworks). The new additions to the founding members include Pitt, UTSW and Roche.

“We are fully committed as a pharmaceutical company to identifying and developing new therapeutic approaches for neuropsychiatric disease and we see this type of public-private collaboration as an important part of our strategy.”

CMC is a Public-Private Pre-Competitive Consortium that brings together disease area expertise, large-scale and well-curated brain sample collections, and data management and analysis expertise with a goal to generate and analyze large-scale genomic data from human subjects with neuropsychiatric disease and to make this data and the associated analytical results broadly available to the public. Phase I of this project will generate whole genome transcriptome data on the prefrontal cortex as well as high-density SNP genotypes from >700 postmortem brain samples from Schizophrenia and control tissue collections at MS, Penn, Pitt and UTSW using funding provided by TAKEDA, Roche and the NIMH. The consortium benefits from synergies created from the combined expertise of all contributors. Currently it is envisaged that this data will become available to the public through Synapse (synapse.sagebase.org) in 2014. Subsequent phases of the project will expand the molecular data for the brain collection to include new brain regions and new types of information beyond transcriptomic data (exome sequencing, epigenetic, etc).

Dr. Jonathan Derry, Vice President of Research at Sage Bionetworks, noted, “We are happy to welcome our new members who will provide both additional samples to our collection and valuable experience that can guide our studies.” Dr. Enrico Domenici, Molecular Biomarker Lead, Neuroscience Discovery and Translational Area, Roche, added, “We are fully committed as a pharmaceutical company to identifying and developing new therapeutic approaches for neuropsychiatric disease and we see this type of public-private collaboration as an important part of our strategy.”

The addition of Pitt and UTSW to the consortium has significantly expanded the brain tissue collection available for data generation. Dr. Carol Tamminga, Professor and Chair of Psychiatry, UTSW, commented, “CMC is a natural partner for us in our efforts to better understand the molecular underpinnings of these devastating mental health diseases. There is no doubt that we will make faster progress to this common goal as a group than if we worked independently.”

The CommonMind Consortium is committed to generating an open resource for the community and invites others with common goals to contact us at [e-mail].

About Sage Bionetworks

Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research organization creating a new paradigm for addressing the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage Bionetworks and its academic and commercial partners employ global coherent molecular and clinical datasets to create validated disease models that improve the speed and efficiency of therapeutic drug development. Sage Bionetworks’ vision is to create an open access, integrative bionetwork evolved by contributor scientists working to eliminate human disease: www.sagebase.org.