Integrating ‘Omics’ Approaches to Prioritize New Pathogenetic Mechanisms for Mental Disorders

Neuropsychopharmacology research is between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the historical, but slow, hypothesis-driven approach, where discovery occurs by testing candidate mechanisms in already well-known biological models. The hard place is the innovative, but overwhelming, hypothesis-free approach, where ‘omics’ analyses of everything that is analyzable generates a deluge of data implicating hitherto unknown mechanisms. So, either we have little data on things we already know, or too much data and cannot find the needle in a haystack. One solution is to mix apples and oranges: integrating cross-species and cross-tissues ‘omics’ data to find mechanisms that recur across different experimental and clinical models. The idea has been used with remarkable success. And yes, we will finish with the proverbs now