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Record-breaking grant: iPSYCH is a beacon of research in the field of psychiatry

The iPSYCH research project has received a third grant of DKK 120 million from the Lundbeck Foundation. The grant means the project remains the largest in the world within the field of psychiatric research.

Is schizophrenia prevention possible? Can you get autism if you have a special genetic variant and at the same time suffer a viral infection in the embryonic state? Should all people with ADHD get the same medicine? These are the kinds of questions that the iPSYCH research project – the Lundbeck Foundation’s Initiative for Integrated Psychiatric Research – is working towards answering.

The project’s most important result during the first years has been to assemble the world's largest data set for the study of such questions. iPSYCH looks into five mental disorders: Schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder (“manic-depression”), depression, autism and ADHD. All cause human misery and create huge costs to societies all over the world.

  Since 2012, when a number of leading researchers were brought together to find the causes of mental disorders, iPSYCH has been involved in publishing more than 500 scientific articles on mental disorders in collaboration with several foreign research institutions.

In 2012, the project received the first of a total of three record-breaking grants from the Lundbeck Foundation. iPSYCH has now received DKK 361 million from the Lundbeck Foundation, which is the largest grant ever made to psychiatric research in Denmark. You can read about the second grant here.

iPSYCH is a national project anchored at Aarhus University in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, the Central Denmark Region and the Capital Region of Denmark, as well as SSI, the Danish State Serum Institute. The project's researchers collaborate with, among others: the Broad Institute, MIT/Harvard University, USA; Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, Johns Hopkins University, USA; Queensland Brain Institute, Australia; the University of California, Los Angeles, USA; deCode Genetics, Iceland; and the Faroese Biobank.  

Further information

Professor Preben Bo Mortensen
Aarhus University, Department of Economics and Business Economics
Phone: (+45) 8716 5359
Mail: pbm@econ.au.dk

Professor Anders Børglum
Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine
Phone: (+45) 6020 2720
Mail: anders@biomed.au.dk

Head of Department Kristjar Skajaa
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine
Phone: (+45) 7845 9000
Mail: kristjar.skajaa@clin.au.dk