The Neurogenomics Division has two goals, both of which derive from the overarching mission of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). It is common knowledge that early intervention and treatment saves lives when it comes to neurological diseases. Therefore, our first goal is to improve the ability to diagnose neurological disease before it strikes. Because these diseases impact so many lives around the world either directly (by having a disease), or indirectly (by caring for a loved one with the disease), the second goal centers on the development of new "smart-drug" therapies.

There are four research units within the division, encompassing the entire breadth of neurological disease:
Neurodegenerative Research Unit
Neurobehavioral Research Unit
Neurodevelopmental Research Unit
Neurobiology Research Unit
Bioinformatics Research Unit

Each research unit represents a unique cross-pollination between basic research and clinicians that leads to successful clinical trials, and ultimately, improved treatments and cures. These ambitious goals can be accomplished by the fusion of a number of unique factors found only at TGen—the best neuroscientists on staff, sophisticated and high-throughput technologies, national partnerships with a diverse range of institutions and patient groups, and clinicians performing trials driven by intelligently-derived therapeutics.

TGen is also part of the NIH Neuroscience Microarray Consortium. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), including 15 NIH institutes that comprise the NIH Neuroscience Blueprint have established a consortium of four centers to provide intramural and extramural investigators with the opportunity to further their research through the use of gene expression profiling technology and SNP array genotyping technology. Scientists use these microarray technologies to compare genetic patterns between an individual with a disease and a normal person. Using this information, investigators hope to be able to identify the genes responsible for certain disorders so that treatments can be developed that have a direct impact on the disease mechanisms. The Microarray Consortium hopes to unravel the molecular mechanisms involved in a multitude of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, autism, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, Tourette Syndrome, cerebral palsy, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and ADHD.

The Microarray Consortium is comprised of four nationally recognized centers of excellence in expression profiling located at Duke University in Durham, NC, University of California in Los Angeles, CA, Yale University and TGen. The consortium provides the infrastructure to enable investigators to perform microarray experiments on several different platforms at reagent cost and to offer assistance with experimental design and bioinformatics analysis of the data.

The Microarray Consortium is the only one in the country to apply high-throughput genomic tools to brain disease research. The primary goal of this consortium is to further basic and translational research through acquisition and dissemination of high quality expression and genotyping array data. Data generated by the consortium is made publicly available six months after the completion of each project so that the scientific community can obtain synergies and critical mass from the collection of data sets. One of the major goals of the consortium is to use web-based repositories to make gene expression analyses widely available to neuroscientists, and to make it easier for gene expression data to be shared among investigators, accelerating the rate of scientific research. By pooling the genomic capabilities of the three centers and sharing findings through publicly accessible web sites, the chance of finding viable cures and therapies for many debilitating neurological illnesses is increased.