Project Grant R56MH143740
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded University of California, Los Angeles $764,785 under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) on July 16, 2026, to investigate context-dependent disease mechanisms in neurodevelopmental disorders, specifically the 16p11.2 chromosomal deletion (16PDEL) implicated in autism, intellectual disability, and ADHD. The project will use a proprietary in vitro human stem cell platform called the Cell Village to conduct high-throughput...
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded The Regents of the University of California, San Francisco $832,307 on April 24, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to support research into the genetic control of basal telencephalic development and the transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms governing forebrain GABAergic neuron differentiation. The research addresses dysregulation of basal ganglia and cortical development as a central factor in epilepsy,...
- The National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health awarded The Regents of the University of California, San Francisco $117,747 on June 1, 2026 under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) for functional characterization of schizophrenia-related risk genes and variants in neurogenesis using cerebral organoids. The project investigates how schizophrenia-associated genetic variants disrupt neurogenesis, the developmental process by which neurons form in the...
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York $534,191 on April 1, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to develop robust fine-mapping tools for genetic discovery in neuropsychiatric traits using deep phenotype data from diverse populations. The project addresses the challenge of understanding genetic causes of complex neuropsychiatric conditions including autism spectrum disorders, bipolar disorder, and...
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded the University of California, Los Angeles $817,686 under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) on April 25, 2026, to investigate autonomic regulation of brain function and cognition in patients with first-episode schizophrenia and healthy individuals. The project examines how dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system mechanistically contributes to disorganized brain activity and cognitive impairment in schizophrenia, focusing on...
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded the University of Southern California $1.105 million on August 7, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to establish a global framework for harmonized functional MRI analysis in psychiatry. The project will harmonize resting-state fMRI datasets across eight psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression disorder, obsessive compulsive...
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded the University of Southern California $855,772 on July 15, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to characterize autism spectrum disorder heterogeneity using machine learning methods and identify genetic and environmental drivers of clinical variation. The recipient will apply discriminative dimensionality reduction tree (DDRTREE), an unsupervised machine learning model, to construct autism subtypes, continuous subtype...
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded the University of Southern California $1.509 million on September 19, 2025, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to develop machine learning risk prediction models for persistent adverse mental health outcomes in autistic children and youth, leveraging social determinants of health from electronic health record data. The research uses natural language processing to extract social and ecological factors from clinical notes...
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded Yale University $157,388 on July 1, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to functionally characterize somatic mosaic variants in the brains of patients with schizophrenia and autism and determine their causal roles in neurodevelopmental disease. The funded work applies massively parallel reporter assays, CRISPR technology, and human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neural progenitor cells and post-mitotic neurons...
- The National Institute of Mental Health awarded The Leland Stanford Junior University $734,707 on August 13, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to investigate the coordinated maturation of neurons and synapses in the adolescent human neocortex. The research develops a pipeline to retrieve and analyze tissue specimens resected during pediatric neurosurgical procedures for epilepsy, vascular malformations, or brain tumors. The study examines whether postnatal...
The National Institute of Mental Health awarded the University of California, Los Angeles $772,569 on August 17, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to conduct highly parallel analysis of high-confidence autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia risk gene mechanisms. The recipient will study approximately 50 risk genes identified as harboring rare, protein-disrupting heterozygous mutations associated with these neuropsychiatric disorders. The work leverages a scalable human induced pluripotent stem cell engineering platform and high-throughput, high-content phenotyping to conduct multi-layered molecular and cellular analyses. The research includes differentiation of mutant and control lines into two-dimensional neuronal cultures for high-content imaging assessment of proliferation and morphological features, RNA sequencing, and high-sensitivity proteomics to measure gene expression and identify perturbed pathways. The study employs automated calcium imaging to assess spontaneous and evoked neuronal activity and network synchrony. To model early cortical development in vitro, the recipient will generate three-dimensional human cortical organoids, enabling investigation of cell type specification, maturation, and tissue architecture. Advanced platforms including multiplexed spatial proteomics and frameshift technology coupled with clarity imaging will examine cell and dendritic morphology in detail. Proteomic and transcriptomic data will be integrated using weighted gene co-expression network analysis. Performance occurs in Los Angeles, California, with a period of performance from August 17, 2026, through August 16, 2027.
Mod # | Description | ReasonForModification | Federal Obligation | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not listed | $772.6k | 8/19/26 |