This week on The Genetics Podcast, Patrick is joined by Dr. Cara Altimus, CEO of BD², and Dr. Benjamin Neale, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. They discuss how rare variant discovery is opening new routes into bipolar disorder biology, how BD² is combining genetics with longitudinal multimodal data, and how patient priorities are shaping a research model focused on faster diagnosis and more precise treatments.
Show Notes
0:00 Intro to The Genetics Podcast
00:58 Welcome to Cara and Ben
01:57 The origin and aims of BD2
04:20 Major knowledge gaps in bipolar disorder genetics
06:43 Using genetics and deep phenotyping to map bipolar disorder biology
13:47 Why bipolar disorder genetics needs both scale and deep clinical data
17:32 Finding the most predictive data for bipolar disorder biology and care
19:19 The search for scalable biomarkers in bipolar disorder
21:35 How BD² is building a bridge from discovery to clinical trials
26:48 Why bipolar diagnosis takes years and what patients want research to solve
33:08 How BD² is looking to other programs as inspiration to build a new research model
35:31 What overlapping risk genes reveal across bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and autism
37:40 How rare variants could de-risk precision psychiatry trials
41:25 How BD² is scaling from early milestones to global funder momentum
45:04 Closing remarks
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