ANTONA-MH: Accelerating New Therapies with Objective Neurophysiological Assessment for Mental Health

Mental health conditions like depression and schizophrenia affect millions of citizens in the UK, and have consequences for their quality of life, as well as families and wider communities. One reason that mental health conditions are difficult to treat is that it is hard to diagnose them precisely, or to know when a possible treatment is working, as that is based mostly on what a patient tells their doctor. This means that is can take weeks or months for GPs and consultants to find the best treatment for each patient, and even then many people do not respond to any treatment without unacceptable side effects. Drug companies are developing new medicines to improve this, but they have the same difficulties in finding the right volunteers for trials, and in measuring whether their new therapies work.

In this project, BrainWaveBank will develop a new device to detect mental health diseases, track how symptoms develop over time, and evaluate the efficacy of therapies in treating the disease. It is an easy-to-use wearable headset, accompanied by games that test different mental capacities like emotional processing, memory, concentration, etc. and yields brain-based biomarkers of neurophysiological mechanisms and cognitive functions. This will support a transformation in psychiatric drug development, helping to enable better, cheaper, and faster drug development, and improved tailoring of therapies to an individual to improve patient outcomes and reduce cost of care.