Andrés Ingason, a scientist at the Centre for Public Health Sciences at the University of Iceland, recently received a major grant from the Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark for the research project “From Genes to Biology in Mental Health: Population-based Insights from Human Gene Dosage Sensitivity.” The grant awarded to Andrés’ project amounts to just over 6.5 million Danish kroner.
Andrés says the grant will fund a four-year project, which is expected to conclude in 2030. “This is a new project, largely based on my research in Denmark in recent years, focusing on copy number variations in the human genome and their links to mental disorders. The project will use new technology to systematically identify congenital gene deletions among hundreds of thousands of individuals in a large Danish research cohort and study the effects of such mutations on cells, brain development, and health. This will give us better insight into the biological processes underlying mental disorders, paving the way for discoveries of drug targets based on realistic disease models,” explains Andrés when asked to briefly describe the essence of his project.
“The grant will fund two postdoctoral positions for the duration of the research, and they will carry out the project in collaboration with scientists from deCODE Genetics and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR) in the United States,” says Andrés, who is the principal investigator of the project.
In addition to his position as a research professor at the University of Iceland, Andrés also serves as senior researcher at the Institute for Biological Psychiatry within the Mental Health Services of the Copenhagen region, and the grant is awarded to him through that position.
Read more about the Lundbeck Foundation and the Ascending Investigators 2025 here