Depression subtyping

Overview

We are the first to incorporate brain structural data, polygenic risk scores of other diseases, genetic profiles and a causal algorithm of gene selection into a multi-view clustering framework for complex diseases.

  • Depression subtyping 0
  • Depression subtyping 1
Commercialisation opportunities
technology licensing agreement
Problem addressed

We aim to stratify depression patients into meaningful subgroups with biological and clinical differences. Successful subtyping will enable more individualized and effective preventive/ intervention strategies to be adopted, which in turn could lead to improved prognosis.

Innovation
  • Our invention is the first that combines brain structural features with polygenic risk scores of related disorders as well as genotype-imputed expression profiles of related brain tissues for the subtyping of depression using a multiview biclustering method.
  • Causal inference was employed to identify causally-relevant genes to inform gene selection.
Key impact
  • Subtyping depression patients into subgroups with varied treatment responses and hospitalization risks.
  • Compared with clinical symptoms, brain structural features can be more objectively assessed and are more directly linked to the underlying disease biology. Clinicians are not necessarily involved in this feature extraction process.
  • Subgroup-specific genes selected from our invention are more likely to be clinically relevant and interpretable, and such genes may help to explain the contributing disease mechanisms.
Application
  • Depression, other pyschiatric and neurological disorders
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Founded in 1963, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a forward-looking comprehensive research university with a global vision and a mission to combine tradition with modernity, and to bring together China and the West. CUHK teachers and students hail from all around the world. Four Nobel laureates are associated with the university, and it is the only tertiary institution in Hong Kong with recipients of the Nobel Prize, Turing Award, Fields Medal and Veblen Prize sitting as faculty in residence. CUHK graduates are connected worldwide through an extensive alumni network. CUHK undertakes a wide range of research programmes in many subject areas, and strives to provide scope for all academic staff to undertake consultancy and collaborative projects with industry. 

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