Tackling Schizophrenia—How the Blau Center Is Becoming a Force for Innovative Research

The Blau Center was established in 2021 and is led by René Kahn, MD, PhD, the Esther and Joseph Klingenstein Professor and Mount Sinai Health System Chair of Psychiatry, who is world renowned in the field. Alexander Charney, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Neuroscience, and Neurosurgery, serves as Executive Director.

In its first year, the Center has already instituted several major initiatives.

Among them was the creation of the Blau Center Clinic, which enables Mount Sinai physicians and other clinicians to quickly evaluate and treat patients in the community who have severe mental illness, especially adolescents with psychotic disorders.

The clinic provides weekly individual and group psychotherapy and care management services. The group therapy sessions provide supportive treatment for patients to meet individualized goals through a program based on the Community Reinforcement Approach (CRA).

Fundamentally, CRA provides a semi-structured setting that allows individuals to gain benefit from making changes to their environment that reduce or help them better manage their most debilitating symptoms. The setting also encourages participants to define and discuss overcoming barriers that will specifically help them meet their particular life goals.

Currently, too little is known about why certain patients get better, and why others do not. To that end, the Blau Center has enrolled 130 consenting participants in a treatment response study in the inpatient setting to examine if and how individual patients show improvement. Through the collection of clinical interview data and biological specimens (for example, blood and saliva) at several time points during the admissions process, along with electronic medical record analyses, our clinicians and researchers expect to gain better understanding of how current treatments for severe mental illness work in a controlled environment over time—and, significantly, where major gaps in therapy exist.

Additionally, the Blau Center has contributed in crucial ways to the development and launch of the Mount Sinai Million Health Discoveries Program, through which 1 million consenting patients within the Mount Sinai Health System will be enrolled to study how genetics and environment impact risk for human disease across all organ systems and medical specialties.

This launch was featured in The New York Times in August 2022, with a focus on the program’s potential to vastly advance the understanding and treatment of schizophrenia in individual patients. Since then, the Mount Sinai Million initiative continues to be promoted by media outlets globally, which additionally positions the Blau Center as a force for innovation at the forefront of science and medicine.

The Blau Center is now embarking on a major effort called the “Mental Illness Genetics Moonshot Study” that complements the Mount Sinai Million initiative and will further help researchers unravel the genetic underpinnings of schizophrenia (see article on the genetic basis of schizophrenia).

The focus of the Mental Illness Genetics Moonshot Study is to discover the genes responsible for increasing risk for schizophrenia and related disorders, or conferring resistance to the illnesses in other individuals. Its findings will be utilized to understand how these genes, acting in conjunction with other factors such as environmental exposures, are responsible for schizophrenia in individual Blau Center patients and susceptible family members.