Facility Renovation and Modernization to Support A National Program on Psychiatric Biotyping Research

About This Grant

This is a proposal to renovate a currently-disused building to create a modern, multi-modal and inter-disciplinary clinical neuroscience research facility at The Institute of Living (IOL) in Hartford, CT. The IOL is a venerable psychiatric institution whose recent behavioral, clinical, and cognitive neuroscience research has attained national recognition in its efforts to understand and better treat schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, depression, ADHD, autism, anxiety disorders, OCD, and addiction. Moreover, IOL’s parent organization Hartford HealthCare (HHC) has embraced a broad biomedical research mission across its seven-hospital network within a strategic plan to make large-scale patient care approach changes that achieve meaningful, high-impact health outcome gains. The proposed new IOL neuroscience research facility represents a key component of that larger strategic plan. It will centralize components of both ongoing and new IOL research programs whose activities will promote the discovery, clinical translation, and education/dissemination of research about biological subtypes (or “biotypes”) of psychiatric disorders at a nationally prominent level. Biotypes are biologically-defined presumptive disease entities – sets of patient characteristics that can be used to classify individual patients into subgroups with different etiologies or who respond to different treatments. IOL investigators have made noteworthy conceptual and empirical contributions to psychiatric neuroscience in the past two decades by demonstrating the importance and translational potential of such biotypes. The proposed facility will build upon this foundation of expertise by consolidating and expanding IOL’s biotyping-relevant research resources – neuroscience equipment for highly detailed, multi-modal research-based deep phenotyping, the IOL’s newly-established experimental therapeutics research Center, and data analysis resources to enhance biotype discovery and translation efforts, both for individual psychiatric diagnoses and transdiagnostically. Starting with IOL’s psychosis patient clinical services that already are being converted into research- based clinics, a key program feature will be to systematically move select clinical programming into the newly-renovated research building so that co-localized research and clinical resources can be optimally harnessed for the goal of generating a national biotyping data resource, as well provide as a successful model for how to best integrate neuroscience biotyping research into clinical service delivery. Our goal is for this dedicated facility-based research approach to lead the field over the next decade in making great leaps forward in discovering effective ways to personalize medicine for more successful 21st century psychiatric care. The proposed 18,886 SF building design vision epitomizes the overarching goal of a facility that not only serves the primary goal of neuroscientific research excellence, but also will help meet our institution’s strategic goals to improve patient access to innovative and experimental treatments, to enhance community engagement, and to deliver the most effective, cutting-edge professional education in psychiatry. Due to the ambitious construction scope, and reflecting the institution’s dedication to the high promise of the program mission, HHC has committed to cost sharing to ensure successful completion of the construction project.