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EMBL-EBI receives UKRI Medical Research Council (MRC) and National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funding for enhancing and translating mental-health omics data into the Open Targets PlatformSummary

• The Open Psychiatry Project will bring together mental health clinical and omics data across the UK through a newly developed federated data architecture platform.
• Analyses and data summaries will be integrated into the Open Targets Platform to make the results available to the wider scientific and industry community.
• The project has received a £2.3 million investment from UKRI Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). 
• This project will enable researchers to analyse these sensitive data across secure environments for new insights into mental health conditions and response to existing medications.

Identifying targets for new treatments for mental health conditions could become faster, thanks to a new initiative that, for the first time, will bring patient data together across the UK and translate it to how genes and molecules contribute to mental health symptoms and outcomes.

The Open Psychiatry Project is the first multi-centre initiative to jointly analyse and contrast existing UK mental health research data to derive more powerful insights into these conditions.

Led by Mary-Ellen Lynall at the University of Cambridge, the project team includes Ellen McDonagh as project co-lead from EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and Open Targets, and other colleagues across multiple UK institutes. People with lived experience of mental health conditions from across the UK co-developed the proposal and will partner with the researchers throughout the project.

The project has received an investment of £2.3 million from the UKRI Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

“The NIHR and the Medical Research Council are leading the way in ensuring advances in data and research lead to improved care for mental health conditions. The Open Psychiatry project will help achieve the government’s ambition for world-class biomedical and health research and innovation,” said Lucy Chappell, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department of Health and Social Care and Chief Executive of the NIHR. “This data platform will help researchers identify more precise and effective interventions, resulting in faster access to new treatments and better support for patients and their families.”

A unified federated data platform for mental-health clinical and omics data

A significant aim of this project is to establish a data federation analysis system, which will allow researchers to analyse data across multiple secure environments without moving or exposing sensitive health or genetic information, ensuring privacy while enabling powerful new insights.

People with lived experience will co-develop the project website design and content, and help in understanding how scientific knowledge can be tailored to non-specialist users to boost accessibility for patients.

The role of the Open Targets Platform

The project will bring together diverse datasets on how genes, cells, and molecules influence mental health conditions. Most psychiatric conditions have a strong genetic basis; however, responses to current treatments are very diverse and often ineffective. Large-scale data analysis is required to create meaningful insights for patients. A systematic analysis of clinical and omics patient data could transform prediction, diagnosis, and treatment through new and personalised interventions. 

The information will be presented on an interactive website, which will offer summaries of patient cohorts. The summary data and key analyses will be integrated into the Open Targets Platform to enhance the existing knowledge on mental-health-related genes, biomarkers, and treatments. This will put the findings into a broader drug discovery context to help translate them into the development of potential new treatments. Overarchingly, this project will help to accelerate scientific discovery, commercial development, and patient involvement in research.

“The Open Psychiatry Project will translate the power of omics data into identifying potential new treatments for mental health conditions,” said Ellen McDonagh, Translational Informatics Director at Open Targets and the EMBL-EBI co-lead for this project. “This is the first major initiative to bring together mental health data for multiple stakeholders in an accessible way, and analysing this information collectively is a key step towards finding new targets for drug development. The findings from this project will be integrated into the Open Targets Platform, where they will enhance existing publicly available data to help identify and prioritise the most promising therapeutic targets.”

One of five funded projects 

Receiving investment from the MRC and the NIHR, the Open Psychiatry Project is one of five initiatives that will bring together a fragmented health data landscape.

“UK biomedical and health data is currently fragmented and inaccessible to many, leading to missed opportunities in generating transformative knowledge through research that will accelerate development of life-saving drugs and improve patient care,” said Patrick Chinnery, Executive Chair of the Medical Research Council. “The projects announced today will bring together biomedical and health data in a number of critically important areas, such as mental health and complex surgical conditions in children, and enhance existing services, tools, and standards to create a stimulating research environment that will benefit many.”

More information about this funding and the full press release was originally published on the UKRI website.