北京大学定量生物学中心

学术报告

题    目: Decoding Brain Disorders: Where Data Meets Lab Science on the Path to Precision Medicine

报告人: Kun Yang (杨坤), Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

时  间: 10月28日（周一）10:30-11:30

地    点: 吕志和楼B101

主持人: 来鲁华 教授

摘要:

The human brain, a complex organ composed of billions of neurons, serves as the command center for our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. When this intricate system falters, it can give rise to a range of brain disorders that significantly impact individuals' lives. Among these, psychiatric conditions—especially psychotic disorders—present major challenges for clinical care, largely due to our limited understanding of their molecular mechanisms. Current treatments for psychosis are designed for the average patient, often resulting in side effects and limited effectiveness for certain subgroups. To improve clinical outcomes, it is essential to decipher molecular mechanisms underlying psychotic disorders and advance toward precision medicine tailored to the distinct mechanisms within each subgroup.

In this seminar, I will present our research efforts to address this critical need. I will begin by providing an overview of our key projects, which approach this challenge from both clinical and mechanistic perspectives. I will then highlight an ongoing study in which we integrate clinical and preclinical data to investigate the mechanisms underlying relapse in psychosis. Using RNA sequencing, neuroimaging, cellular assays, and mouse models, our research has revealed significant post-relapse alterations, with SYT7 emerging as a key hub mediating these changes.

Our findings represent a potential first step toward developing targeted treatments to prevent post-relapse alterations and mitigate the associated poor disease trajectory. By enhancing our understanding of the underlying mechanisms, we hope to contribute to the development of more personalized and effective interventions for psychosis. I look forward to exploring potential collaborations and discussing how these insights might inform future therapeutic strategies and clinical approaches.

报告人简介:

Dr. Yang is a computational biologist with expertise in statistical analysis and next-generation sequencing data analysis. She received her bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees from Peking University, China. She subsequently completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University. She was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2020.

Dr. Yang's research focuses on investigating the molecular mechanisms of the pathological progression and clinical features of psychotic disorders at an early stage using biopsied neuronal cells from living subjects. She is also devoted to applying computational methods to integrate multi-modal data to identify biomarkers and drug targets for early diagnosis and reversing the disease course at the early stage, respectively.

In addition to her active research activity and collaborations at Hopkins, as a data scientist, Dr. Yang also pays attention to diversity, data harmonization, and statistical power issues, which may be addressed through multi-institutional collaborations. She is leading consortium projects with the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) consortium to study the structural biomarkers for treatment-resistant antipsychotics and with the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) to identify potential drug targets for early-stage psychosis. She also serves as the data analysis leader, data manager, and coordinator for several projects with teams from the US, Canada, UK, Norway, Belgium, Venezuela, China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.