Matthew Johnson
Senior Group Leader Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard
Dr. Johnson is a developmental neurobiologist and a group leader in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research group studies the impact of psychiatric risk factors, including complement component C4, on brain development. He provides scientific leadership for the PBN, helping to translate progress from basic research into biomarker candidates and serves as liaison for the PBN’s industry collaborations.
Seminars
Psychosis and mood disorders have traditionally been treated as distinct psychiatric conditions, often approached through a behavioral lens. However, modern large-scale genetics studies suggest substantial overlap in both common and rare variant drivers of risk for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and, to a lesser extent, major depressive disorder. Emerging evidence suggests that neuroimmune mechanisms may contribute to pathogenesis in one or more transdiagnostic subsets of patients. Beyond longstanding hypotheses involving systemic inflammation or peripheral cytokines, genetic and neurobiological studies implicate dysfunctional immune pathways and glial cells within the central nervous system as drivers of psychiatric symptoms. This workshop will explore recent and ongoing efforts to identify molecular biomarkers to stratify psychiatric patient populations, and insights from our evolving understanding of autoimmune contributions to psychiatric conditions. As boundaries blur between psychiatric diagnoses, between the clinical specialties of neurology and psychiatry, and mechanistic understanding accumulates, this session will use an interactive workshop format to explore what this convergence means for therapeutic development, biomarker discovery, and clinical trial design, and whether the field is ready to shift toward biologically targeted interventions.
Key Topics to Be Explored:
- What are some of the unique challenges to neuroimmune drug development for psychotic and mood disorders vs neurodegenerative disorders?
- What sort of data, tools or resources, if produced, would help “de-risk” investment in this area?
- For clinical progress, how important is it to have blood biomarkers (as opposed to CSF/imaging/ephys biomarkers)?
- If a person with a longstanding diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were to have complete symptom resolution after immunotherapy, does this mean they had been misdiagnosed? How relevant is the answer to this question to neuroimmune drug development efforts?
- What changes would need to happen in the way clinical psychiatry is practiced in the USA for neuroimmune drug development or deplopyment to be most successful in this space? How might these changes occur?
