Matthew State, M.d., Ph.D.
Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF, National Academy of Medicine
“Part of the challenge we have with our entire diagnostic system is that nature doesn’t carve at the joints—there’s a lot of overlap with almost everything we see.”
My background
I specialize in childhood onset neuro-developmental disorders, both as a child psychiatrist and a molecular geneticist.
tourette’s, autism, and OCD
My lab has worked for a long time on the genetics of Tourette’s syndrome (which is closely related to OCD), but our most dramatic success is in the area of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We’re still a long way from being able to design treatments for neuro-developmental disorders that have autism as a core feature, but if you look at how genetics has changed our understanding over the last 10 years, we can tell you a lot more about the basic molecular cellular processes that are going wrong.
From genetics to brain circuits to human behavior
We want to understand why someone has OCD at the molecular, cellular, and circuit level, and genetics is the route to help us do exactly that. It allows us to sort through and find the change in the genome that tells us why one person is very high risk for OCD and the next person is not. While we have a general idea that the cortical-striatal-thalamic circuits are involved in understanding OCD, genetic insights would help us fill the huge gap of information the field is still lacking.
DNA blueprint for OCD
DNA is one of many ways to understand a biological disorder. It’s the blueprint for biological processes, and is found in every cell of the body. When trying to understand why some people get a disorder and others don’t, we’re not interested in the 99% of genes that make us similar—we’re looking for the 1% that differs.
A future library of OCD molecules
Our hope is to give the other scientists in this collaboration (and, ultimately, scientists around the world) a library of molecular clues that we derive through genetics to say, “Yes, this individual change in this individual gene has a large effect in causing obsessive-compulsive disorder. We know that when this changes, it leads to OCD.”