Pharmacological implications of emerging schizophrenia genetics: Can the bridge from 'genomics' to 'therapeutics' be defined and traversed?

Abstract

Recent schizophrenia genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified genomic variants of common and rare frequency, significantly associated with schizophrenia. While numerous functional genomics efforts are ongoing to elucidate the biological effects of schizophrenia risk variants, a consideration of their therapeutic implications is timely and imperative, for patients as well as for an iterative effect on elucidating the underlying biology and pathophysiology of illness. The current article reviews efforts to translate emerging schizophrenia genomics into novel approaches to target discovery and therapeutic intervention. Though the path from 'genetic risk to therapy' is far from straightforward, there are provocative early possibilities that harbor the promise of treatment based on causation rather than phenomenology, as well as 'precision psychiatry,' a basis for stratifying patients to enable more precise and effective, personalized therapy.