About Us
The immunopsychiatry research group is based at the University of Bristol within the
Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit
and the
Centre for Academic Mental Health.
The group investigates the role of inflammation in psychiatric disorders, neurodevelopment, cognition, and in physical and psychiatric multimorbidity across the life course using population data, genetics, and early-phase clinical trials. The aim of our work is to identify and validate novel immunological mechanisms and treatment options for psychiatric disorders, with a focus on depression and schizophrenia. This work is clinically important because depression and schizophrenia affect one in four people in their lifetime, but one in three people affected by these illnesses do not respond to currently available treatments.
The group is led by Golam Khandaker, Professor of Psychiatry at Bristol Medical School, Head of Translational Mental Health Programme at the Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at the Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust.
We are happy to hear from people interested in mental health research including prospective students, staff, collaborators, study participants, the media, and people with lived experience of mental illness.
Our Research
The immunopsychiatry research group investigates the role of inflammation (e.g., immune proteins, cells, genes) in psychiatric disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, multimorbidity, and cognition using cutting-edge genetic (e.g., Mendelian randomization, genetic colocalization) and non-genetic methods (e.g., trajectory based modelling, machine learning) applied to large-scale psychiatric, genomic and immunological data, as well as clinical trials of immunotherapy for people with depression and psychosis. The aim of this work is to identify and validate immunological causal mechanisms and treatment targets for psychiatric disorders to help develop new treatment and biology-based classification/subtyping of psychiatric conditions.
All Research Projects
