Dr. Wouter Peyrot, assistant professor at Amsterdam UMC, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant worth €1.5 million for his project PersonalRiskProfile. This ambitious project aims to develop advanced genetic methods to identify individuals at increased risk of serious mental illness (SMI), paving the way for new approaches for genetically-informed personalised prevention in psychiatry.

Serious mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, has devastating effects on patients and their families. A key clinical challenge is identifying at-risk individuals for prevention. Recent progress in genetics offers unique opportunities, but new approaches are needed to combine different types of genetic information and capture shared vulnerability across disorders.

With his expertise as psychiatrist and as statistical geneticist with a background in mathematics, Dr. Peyrot brings a unique perspective to this challenge, linking clinical needs with advanced quantitative methods.

PersonalRiskProfile

PersonalRiskProfile will integrate diverse genetic data—including common and rare variants, family history, and cross-ancestry prediction patterns—into the unified personalised genetic risk profile (PGRP) method. Unlike most existing approaches that focus on predicting a single disorder, PGRP will generate risk profiles for multiple psychiatric conditions at once, reflecting the reality that these disorders are often correlated in clinical practice.

Dr. Peyrot explains: “Our aim is to provide clinicians with additional tools to identify individuals at risk of serious mental illness and enable more effective prevention. The real clinical value of genetic prediction will come from combining it with existing clinical approaches to risk assessment, and I am excited to work on bringing these together.”

European Research Council

ERC Starting Grants are among the most prestigious European research awards. They support outstanding early-career researchers in building their own teams and pursuing high-risk, high-gain projects. Read more about the ERC Starter Grant on their website.