Lucas Toshio Ito

Selected work

Current research

My research began with the BHRC and has expanded across polygenic risk, suicidality, neuroimaging, and molecular markers. These are the main projects that connect that trajectory.

The question behind the work

Why do people with similar inherited liabilities follow different mental-health trajectories, including vulnerability to suicidal thoughts and behaviors? I approach this question through evidence from Latin American and admixed populations that remain underrepresented in psychiatric genetics.

01

UNIFESP · ongoing

Genetic risk in the Brazilian High-Risk Cohort

The BHRC has followed children and adolescents from São Paulo and Porto Alegre across three assessment waves. I have worked with the cohort since my undergraduate research, first on genetic-risk prediction and now on how common and rare variants relate to psychiatric outcomes, cognition, and brain structure.

The cohort’s admixed composition is central to the work: it helps us evaluate and improve methods for young people in Latin America and other populations still underrepresented in psychiatric-genetics research.

Polygenic scoresLongitudinal dataNeuroimagingAdmixture

Selected outputs

BHRC cohort profile Anxiety symptom trajectories Major-depression polygenic risk
02

Ongoing · collaborative

Suicidality across biological levels

Suicidal thoughts and behaviors are becoming a central focus of my research. I am studying them through several complementary projects: CNV-SUI on rare structural variation, miRNA-SUI on molecular signatures, and an integrated neuroimaging–genetics project.

Together, these projects ask whether signals measured at different biological levels can clarify vulnerability, developmental pathways, and heterogeneity in suicidality.

Suicide genomicsCNVsmiRNANeuroimaging

Selected outputs

Developmental predictors of suicide attempts Genomic studies of suicidality in Latin America Cross-disorder CNV analysis
03

Collaborative work

Molecular and neuroimaging markers

My collaborations span extracellular-vesicle microRNAs, longitudinal neuroimaging, cognition, and psychiatric phenotypes. These projects taught me to move between molecular and population-scale data while keeping study design and development in view.

I am particularly interested in analyses that explain why a biomarker separates groups, when it does so, and whether that result remains useful outside the original sample.

miRNABrain structureCognitionReproducible analysis

Selected outputs

Extracellular-vesicle microRNAs Childhood maltreatment and hippocampal development Neuroimaging association scores in ADHD
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