On Mar. 12, 2026, the Stanley Family Foundation renewed its commitment to psychiatric research at the Broad Institute, bringing its total investment to more than $1 billion. This funding, including their newest commitment of $280 million to the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, is opening up new paths to urgently needed therapies for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

For decades, scientists have struggled to understand the biological causes of psychiatric disorders as patients continue to face both stigma and limited treatment options. Schizophrenia, in particular, is a leading cause of mortality in young people, and no drugs have been developed based on an understanding of disease mechanisms.

Ted and Vada Stanley’s passion for helping people with severe psychiatric conditions began decades ago when their son Jonathan was stricken with severe bipolar disorder while in college. While Jonathan manages his illness with the help of lithium, first used to treat patients with mental health challenges in 1949, the Stanleys were struck by how limited treatment options were for most patients, spurring them eventually to place a big bet on human genetics as the best path to more effective therapies.

Their partnership with the Broad Institute began with a goal of finding better treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder by uncovering the genetic clues to their underlying biology. In 2007, Broad formally launched the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, led initially by Edward Scolnick, Broad core member emeritus.

In 2014, researchers from the Stanley Center and collaborating institutions published the largest genomic study on any psychiatric disorder at the time, studying more than 150,000 people and identifying more than 100 locations in the human genome associated with the risk of developing schizophrenia.

In 2016, Stanley Center researchers led a landmark study digging further into this genetic analysis and revealing that a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia is increased if they inherit specific variants in C4, an immune system gene related to synaptic pruning. This study marked a new insight into the biological basis of schizophrenia. The acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health at the time, Bruce Cuthbert, described the study as “a crucial turning point in the fight against mental illness.”

Further studies in 2022 of larger cohorts and using genome sequencing technologies identified additional genes associated with schizophrenia and the first strong genetic risk factor for bipolar disorder. Two international consortia, both led by Stanley Center researchers, were integral to this work: the SCHEMA (Schizophrenia Exome Sequencing Meta-analysis) consortium, which has collected samples from 143,000 individuals and analyzed the DNA of 75,000 of them, and the BipEx (Bipolar Exome) consortium.