HORMA domain-containing protein 1 (HORMAD1) is a protein that promotes meiotic recombination and its expression is usually restricted to germ-line cells, although it has been shown to be actively expressed out of context in about 60% of triple-negative breast cancers (TNBCs). A team at The Institute of Cancer Research has found that this aberrant expression in tumor cells perturbs mitotic arrest and generates aneuploidy, leading to a weakening of the spindle assembly checkpoint and in kinetochore-microtubule error correction.

There is broad agreement that psychiatric diagnoses in their current form are not reflective of any underlying biology, and that this is one of the things hampering psychiatric drug development. “We are still fully reliant on descriptive diagnoses that yield heterogeneous patient cohorts,” Steve Hyman told the audience at the European Congress of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Roadmap Meeting on Precision Psychiatry in Amsterdam in January.