BRINGING ADDICTION GENETICS INTO THE CLINIC: ARE WE THERE YET?

Precision psychiatry is advancing at a rapid pace, and the coming years are poised to be transformative. Decades of family and twin studies have established that psychiatric disorders have a familial and heritable component. With the advent of genome-wide association studies, our understanding of the genetic factors influencing psychiatric conditions has progressed tremendously; hundreds of locations in the human genome have been implicated in different aspects of disease, and the list is expanding each year. Many of these DNA risk variations are shared across psychiatric and even somatic conditions, and suggest new ways of defining and potentially treating psychiatric conditions. Suddenly, there may be a cause for optimism that genetic research may impact clinical arenas and have important implications for diagnosis and treatment. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. This talk will discuss recent advances in the field of psychiatric genetics, borrowing examples from the field of substance use disorders, and interrogate how far are we from realizing the promise of precision psychiatry.