Oliver Pain: Bringing together functional and statistical genomics to enhance personalised medicine for neuropsychiatric disorders

Dr Oliver Pain, Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Research Fellow at King's College London, is revolutionizing psychiatric genomics through groundbreaking work on polygenic scoring and precision medicine for mental health disorders. Based at the prestigious Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute since 2021, Pain specialises in statistical genetics, focusing on genome-wide association studies to uncover mechanisms underlying psychiatric and neurological conditions, including autism, antidepressant response, and motor neuron disease. His seminal contribution to the field is the development of GenoPred, a comprehensive open-source pipeline that implements leading polygenic scoring methodologies, making genetic risk prediction accessible to researchers worldwide. This Genomic Press Interview explores Pain's journey from molecular genetics to becoming a pioneer in translational psychiatric genomics, where he bridges statistical and functional genomics to transform mental healthcare. As a contributing author to the landmark 2025 Cell publication, which identified 697 genetic associations for major depression across diverse ancestries, and lead analyst for international antidepressant pharmacogenomics consortia, Pain's research directly addresses critical challenges in personalised psychiatry. His innovative tools for converting polygenic scores to absolute risk scales enable safer clinical interpretation. At the same time, his commitment to developing methods that work across diverse populations ensures genomic advances benefit all communities equitably. Through collaborations spanning academia and industry, including his strategic year at UCB Pharma developing polygenic scoring programmes for drug development, Pain exemplifies how cutting-edge genomic research can be translated into tangible improvements for individuals living with psychiatric conditions.