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

抑郁症和精神分裂症等心理健康状况影响着英国数百万公民，并对他们的生活质量、家庭和更广泛的社区产生影响。精神健康状况难以治疗的一个原因是，很难准确地诊断它们，或者知道一种可能的治疗何时起作用，因为这主要是基于病人告诉医生的情况。这意味着全科医生和咨询师可能需要几周或几个月的时间才能为每个病人找到最佳治疗方案，即使这样，许多人对任何治疗都没有反应，而且还会产生不可接受的副作用。制药公司正在开发新的药物来改善这种状况，但他们在寻找合适的志愿者进行试验以及衡量他们的新疗法是否有效方面同样面临困难。在这个项目中，脑波银行将开发一种新设备来检测精神健康疾病，跟踪症状随着时间的推移如何发展，并评估治疗疾病的疗效。这是一款易于使用的可穿戴式耳机，配有游戏，可以测试不同的心理能力，如情绪处理、记忆、注意力等，并产生基于大脑的神经生理机制和认知功能的生物标志物。这将支持精神科药物开发的转型，帮助实现更好、更便宜、更快的药物开发，并改进针对个体的治疗方法，以改善患者的治疗效果，降低护理成本。

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.