Stephanie Francoise Claire Le Hellard

Position

Professor, Human Genetics

Affiliation

Research

The aim of my research group is to identify how different layers of genetics, epigenetics and gene expression can be involved together in the development of mental disorders, their outcome and how they are modulated by the environment.

I am a core researcher at the NORMENT, a Norwegian Centre of Excellence for Research on Mental Health. The NORMENT is described here: http://www.med.uio.no/norment/english/ In Bergen I am situated at the Dr Martens group for research on biological psychiatry, our research activity is described here: http://www.uib.no/en/rg/geneticsgroup/106397/martens-group#at-a-glance

Description of our group in the NORMENT centre:

Epigenetics of Mental Disorders

About the group

The group consists of people with background in genetics, statistics, medicine and informatics who together bring their complementary expertise to try understand the interaction between genetic and environmental risk in mental disorders. We work in close collaboration with clinicians.

We use datasets generated in house or publicly available that combine genetic, epigenetic and gene expression datasets for mental disorders (mostly schizophrenia and bipolar disorders) that are in addition well annotated for environmental factors.

Aims

Together with the members of my group we are focusing our research on the Epigenetics of Mental Disorders and their treatment (incl. treatment response).

Most of mental disorders are multifactorial in nature, which means that several genetic risk factors combined with environmental risk factors increase the risk to develop a disorder.

Epigenetic modifications, are changes added to the DNA (without changing the DNA sequence) that can regulate the expression of genes, for example the addition of methylation groups on the DNA (aka DNA methylation). Some of these modifications can be dependent of the genetic background, on the biological development (age or sex) or influenced by the environment (e.g. risk factors or treatment). We are especially interested in DNA methylation differences between patients with mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety, OCD... and controls.  DNA methylation differences are also observed under exposure to some environmental factors such as smoking, stress, cannabis use, etc... There are also some studies that have reported how treatment with either antidepressant or with cognitive therapy can be associated with differences in DNA methylation.

Thus the aim of our research is to identify epigenetic factors associated with the different aspects of psychiatric disorders: the risk to develop such disorders and how to treat them. 

Specifically our projects are aimed at: 

  • Investigating epigenetic modifications in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders.
  • Molecular mechanisms of exposure to several environmental risk in patients with psychosis (cannabis, trauma, asphyxia, ...).
  • Identification of regions of differential methylation across psychiatric disorders and through the life span.
  • DNA methylation changes associated with treatment and treatment response in OCD, psychosis and depression.

 

The group currently consist of 1 senior researcher, 2 postdocs, 3 PhD students, 1 forskerlinje student, 1 bio-engineer and myself.

Teaching

I teach Genetics and Evolution to medical students in their 3rd semester, at the Faculty of Medicine, UiB.

I teach a MSc course in Human Genetics (HUMGEN301) at the Faculty of Medicine, UiB. https://www.uib.no/en/course/HUMGEN301

I also participate in the IGSIN course for PhD students, UiB, and the Master course in Genetics of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oslo.

 

Publications
Academic article
Poster
Errata
Doctoral dissertation
Reader opinion piece
Abstract
Academic literature review

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

See my ORCID page:  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8085-051X