Download Ph.D. (fulltime) VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, The

Ph.D. (fulltime)
VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Job description
The goal of this project is to identify the genes responsible for depression, making use of
genome-wide association data. You will be trained in finemapping, resequencing high
priority candidate genes, bioinformatic analysis for biologically relevant variants, functional
analysis of high priority variants. You will be responsible for the generation of reliable data
on this project. In addition you will investigate patients with depression from NESDA cohort
(see www.nesda.nl) by 1) performing a genome-wide expression analysis 2) collecting and
isolating RNA from a two-year follow-up 3) validate relevant gene expression data and
candidate RNA’s, that are differentially expressed at baseline collection and after two years.
You will be supervised on a daily basis by a postdoc and by the research team, including e.g.
statistician, a geneticist, a psychiatrists, a data manager and a genetical epidemiologist.
Requirements
-
Master degree in (Bio)medical Science, (medical) Biology, degree in medicine or
related background
Interest and preferably experience in genetic, statistical, bioinformatics, molecular and
cell biological techniques
Ability to work in a multidisciplinary team
Candidate needs to be ambitious and innovative
Organization
The Section Medical Genomics, Department of Clinical Genetics and the Department of
Psychiatry (VUMC) are part of the Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research-VU, in
which research focuses on depression and cognition.
http://www.cncr.nl/
Condition of employment
You will work as a team member of TI Pharma project. This is one of the projects under the
TI Pharma initiative to bring together university and industry. The partners on the project are
Organon, University Medical Center Utrecht, VU and VU University Medical Center
Amsterdam.
Duration of the contract:4 years. You will enrol in the PhD graduate programs of the
TiPharma institute, the CNCR and the Graduate school for Neuroscience Amsterdam.
Furthermore you will attend a unique drug discovery education and training program offered
by TI Pharma.
Additional information
According to the WHO, depression will be the second leading cause of disability worldwide
by 2020 and costs over $43 billion/year in the US alone. In the Priority Medicine program the
large gap between treatments needs availability is especially underscored for psychiatric
disorders, such as mood disorders and psychosis. The efficacy of currently available anti-
depressants ranges from conservative estimates of 35% to more optimistic estimates of 60%.
This is primarily caused by a lack of proper diagnosis of patients resulting in ill-defined
treatment strategies but also the lack of proper assessment of novel treatment approaches
during preclinical and clinical drug development by the pharmaceutical industry.
Diagnostic accuracy and prediction of treatment-outcome is limited by subjective phenotypic
assessments and would strongly benefit from psychometric and biological, so called
endophenotypes, in combination with genetical assessments. The endophenotype that is most
proximal and direct to the genotype in gene expression. Therefore for the prediction of
pharmaco-treatment outcome, and testing drug efficacy in the clinical phase, there is a great
need to apply pharmacogenomics technologies including genetics, genome-wide expression
studies. This way, we aim to improve the classification of patient groups for better evaluation
of randomized trials and allowing for more focussed clinical trials leading to improved
medications in mood disorder and psychosis.
Area of research of this project is identification of the possible candidate regions involved in
depression and subsequently the biological important variants. The starting point will be the
results of the whole genome association study funded through the GAIN initiative. Through
this initiative the results of GWA study on ~1860 patients and matched controls from the twin
register of Netherlands. For these regions we will perform the detailed fine-mapping. While
the results from the GAIN study may identify specific candidate variants (from known SNPs)
for functional assays to be followed up directly, it is much more likely that they will identify
regions showing evidence for association with disease, but not the relevant functional variant
per se. Therefore we will conduct in depth genotyping of these regions for association and
haplotype analysis , investigate the possible biological relevance of these variants in more
detail and conduct both in vitro and in vivo functional assays of the variants. The other part
of the project is performing a genome-wide expression analysis which can be used to identify
subgroups ad inter-individual differences in disease and response to a given treatment.
Application
You can apply by sending your application to:
Dr. Marianna Bevova
VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam
[email protected]
Tel:+31-20-5983854
Deadline for applications is 30.11.08