10028348Neuronal Screening Platform for Improved Mental Healthcare (NSP-4-IMH)ClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UK**The Challenge:** Severe mental illnesses (SMI), such as schizophrenia, causes immense suffering to those who experience it. It presents a significant cost burden, both for individuals (those experiencing schizophrenia have a reduced life expectancy of 10-25 years) and society, through lost workdays and care costs. New medications are needed to improve the outcomes for people experiencing SMI; however, our inability to identify the best candidate drugs presents a significant challenge, as it often results in failed clinical trials, at significant cost; in turn reducing appetite for investment in drug development (clinical trials in psychiatry cost between $10m to over $100m). **How?** The answer lies in safe, cost-effective lab-based screening using human cells: efficiently weeding out the compounds that don't work and identifying the ones with the highest chance of success, before involving a single human participant or engaging burdensome clinical trial procedures. As a feasibility study, we have chosen to focus on schizophrenia; furthermore, this human cellular approach can be expanded to work for many other mental health disorders. **The Innovation:** We will use cells derived from blood samples taken from 50 patients with schizophrenia and use molecular methods to turn these into brain cells (neurons). Our platform will use thousands of miniature electrodes to measure the activity in these cells; it will be as if we were examining 50 different people's reactions -- but all done in a single cycle, in the laboratory. Because the activity is different in cells from people with schizophrenia compared to cells from people without, the platform can be used to test the effect of different compounds -- with technicians looking for signs of recovery in the atypical cells, signalling a likely drug to progress to clinical trial. In the future this approach will also enable is to select which patients will respond best to a given therapy. **The Value:** Improving the ability to identify the best drugs to take to trial will both benefit companies commercially and increase the likelihood of developing new successful treatments for SMI. We will develop the first commercial screening platform with cell lines from 50 schizophrenia patients. The direct and indirect costs of schizophrenia are estimated at over £7 billion per year, in the UK alone, so this is an important starting point The platform will be the first of its kind and severe mental illness open the route to more effective and efficient psychiatric drug development.