Department Seminar Series | Innate and Adaptive Immunity in Psychiatry: Insights from Genetic Association Studies and Peripheral Blood Immunophenotyping

There is increasing evidence that the immune system is involved in multiple psychiatric disorders, at least in a subset of patients. I will outline our work using functional enrichment analyses to prioritise the immune cell subsets involved in cross-disorder and individual-disorder genetic risk, highlighting a causal role for adaptive immunity (B and T cells) across multiple disorders. Activated T cells were particularly implicated, suggesting a potential mechanism by which environmental risks (e.g. stress or infection) might stimulate T cells to unmask the effects of psychiatric risk variants. I will also discuss our previous and ongoing work using peripheral blood immunophenotyping (cytometry, bulk transcriptomics and single cell sequencing) to characterise the immune landscape in depression and psychosis, and future directions. I will consider the convergence and divergence of signals from genetic and biomarker studies, and discuss the implications of these two strands of work for pathogenesis and precision treatment in psychiatry.

Hosted in the Seminar room, to join via Zoom, please use the details below:

• https://zoom.us/j/98643323773?pwd=bL0TW4vweAlQzIlL5VEFHKYiEaVYPl.1
• Meeting ID: 986 4332 3773
• Passcode: 758174