Developing minimally invasive, tools and technologies for high throughput, low cost molecular assays for the early diagnosis of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders

Schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder are a major burden to affected individuals and their families and to society at large. These two severe mental illnesses affect at least 2% of the population worldwide, and whilst 50% of sufferers do not receive adequate treatment, they cost hundreds of billions in healthcare provision, treatments and lost earnings. The current diagnosis of schizophrenia (and bipolar disorder etc.) is rather subjective, not only because of the complex spectrum of symptoms and their similarity to other mental disorders, but also due to the lack of empirical disease markers. This result in long delays (up to 1-3 years) before appropriate therapeutics is prescribed to first episode schizophrenics.

Early treatment is associated with greatly improved patient outcomes. There is therefore a major unmet clinical need for empirical diagnostic tests for high throughput screening of biological fluids that would enable early and accurate diagnosis of schizophrenia and related disorders. The identification of specific biomarkers for mental disorders would revolutionize the clinical management of affected individuals. Biomarkers will help in the identification of disease sub-types, aid in predicting and monitoring treatment response and compliance, and identify novel drug targets. If such biomarkers can be found in readily accessible body fluids they open up the possibility of developing new early or pre-symptomatic diagnostics and/or treatments to improve outcomes or even prevent disease. The objective of our project is to identify biomarkers of disease and develop a diagnostic assay panel/tool for the high throughput screening of biological samples for clinical research. Moreover this platform will be utilized by SMEs for drug design and development for mental disorders research into new animal models for mental disorders and identifying biomarkers for other mental disorders