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疾病影响着数百万英国公民，并对他们的生活质量、家庭和更广泛的社区产生影响。精神疾病很难治疗的一个原因是，很难准确诊断这些疾病，也很难知道可能的治疗方法何时有效，因为这主要是基于患者告诉医生的话。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患者找到最好的治疗方法，即使这样，许多人对任何治疗都没有反应，没有不可接受的副作用。制药公司正在开发新药来改善这一点，但他们在寻找合适的志愿者进行试验和衡量他们的新疗法是否有效方面也面临着同样的困难。在这个项目中，BrainWaveBank将开发一种新的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，并评估治疗方法在治疗疾病中的效果。这是一款易于使用的可穿戴耳机，伴随着测试情绪处理、记忆、注意力等不同心理能力的游戏，并产生基于大脑的神经生理机制和认知功能的生物标记物。这将支持精神科药物开发的转型，有助于实现更好、更便宜和更快的药物开发，并改进针对个人的治疗方法，以改善患者结果并降低护理成本。

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.