Institute of Biological Psychiatry is an interdisciplinary research facility working in the intersection between molecular biology, genomics, register research and psychiatry.
Our research focuses on the biological expression of mental disorders, and the association between genetics and mental illness, and we house more than 30 people with a broad range of academic and professional backgrounds.
Headed by Professor and Research Director Thomas Werge, the institute is the epicenter of biomedical psychiatric research and clinical biochemistry in the Mental Health Services in the Capital Region of Denmark.
Additionally, we are affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Copenhagen, and represent one of the six partners in the major iPSYCH Initiative (Lundbeck Foundation’s Initiative for Integrative Psychiatric Research) – the world’s largest psychiatric research project.
The Research Institute was founded in 1916. Located at Sct. Hans – the largest psychiatric hospital in Denmark, and the first hospital in Denmark to fully implement electronic software for medical records and continuous drug-prescription monitoring – we work alongside more than 350 in-patients. In our 100 years existence, we have always worked at the forefront of psychiatric research. For example, the institute fathered the dopamine hypothesis of psychosis in the sixties and the identification of the GABA receptors as the target of benzodiazepines in the seventies.
Today, the institute has become the national reference center for genomic analysis and genetic counselling with particular focus on its application in child and adolescent psychiatry. Since year 2000, Dr. Thomas Werge has directed the Research Institute. Genetic screening programs offered to clinical departments nation-wide was first introduced in 2003 and since elaborated to include genome-wide screening for chromosomal abnormalities. Since 2012, the institute has been part of the iPSYCH Initiative.
Our research is conducted in close collaboration with some of the world’s leading research teams, national initiatives, and international consortia, and we regularly publish our discoveries in major, peer-reviewed journals, enabling others to challenge, expand, make use of, or validate our findings. The institute is based on the Mental Health Centre Sct. Hans in Roskilde and is home to Center for Neurogenetics, Center for Precision Psychiatry, Department of Clinical Biochemistry, and Center for Translational Psychiatry.
