Current Progress in the Genetic Research of Schizophrenia: Relevance for Drug Discovery?

Schizophrenia is a devastating brain disease. The mode of inheritance is complex and non-Mendelian with a high heritability of ca. 65-80%. Given this complexity, until most recently it was notoriously difficult to identify disease genes. Due to new technologies the last few years have brought an explosion of interest in human genetics of complex diseases. The knowledge resulting from the availability of the complete sequence of the human genome, the systematic identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) throughout the genome, and the development of parallel genotyping technology (microarrays) established the conditions that brought about the current revolution in our ability to probe the genome for identifying disease genes. All these studies have opened a window into the biology of common complex diseases and have provided proof of principle and yielded a multitude of genes showing strong association with complex diseases. New findings in schizophrenia will be summarized in this review and discussed in the light of a possible translation into the development of better treatment.