Stanley Medical Research Institute
Torrey is the founder and Executive Director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI), a large, private provider of research on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in the US. SMRI also maintains a collection of postmortem brain tissue from individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression and from unaffected controls, which are made available to researchers without charge.
After reading Torrey's book "Surviving Schizophrenia," Theodore Stanley, a businessman who had made a fortune in direct-mail marketing and whose son had been diagnosed in the late 1980s with bipolar disorder, contacted Torrey and he and his wife provided the funds for the new institute.
As of 2004 the Stanley Institute had 30 employees and funded half of all U.S. research on bipolar disorder and about a quarter of all schizophrenia research. In 2003 the institute's rapidly growing research budget exceeded $40 million, 74 percent of which was given out to other researchers through grants. It reports that 75% of its expenditure goes towards the development of new treatments.
The Stanley Medical Institute in Bethesda Maryland has collected in excess of 600 brains PDF In ARCH GEN PSYCHIATRY/VOL 61, NOV 2004, in a report called, "Brain Anatomy in Adults With Velocardiofacial Syndrome With and Without Schizophrenia", SMRI published results of a Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study showing difference in brain structure of people with and without schizophrenia.
The SMRI has been sued for allegedly taking brains for use in research without proper consent. One lawsuit was settled out of court.
As of 2008 SMRI was also supporting the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, which plans to scan the entire genome for variants that predispose to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and screen hundreds of thousands of compounds against new molecular targets prior to clinical testing.
SMRI reports that it has a close relationship with and is the supporting organization for the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC).
Read more about this topic: E. Fuller Torrey
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