Research Networks and Coordination Center
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is currently supporting three research projects as part of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP®) SCZ program:
Barnaby Nelson, Ph.D., head of ultra-high risk for psychosis research at the Center for Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne and at Orygen, Melbourne, Australia, and Patrick McGorry, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Center for Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne and executive director of Orygen, are leading a multisite project focused on developing models that can predict a wide range of clinical outcomes in clinical high risk (CHR) individuals. As part of this project, Nelson and colleagues will collect a diverse set of biomarkers along with clinical data to develop CHR trajectory-prediction tools that can be used to facilitate the selection of CHR individuals to enroll in clinical trials and monitor disease progression and outcomes.
ProNET: Psychosis-Risk Outcomes Network
Scott Woods. M.D., Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, and co-principal investigators Carrie Bearden, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and John Kane, M.D., Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, are leading a multisite project, including 26 international sites, mapping a wide range of biomarkers (including brain structure and function, psychopathology and cognition, genetics, behavior, and natural language and speech) onto a set of CHR trajectories and outcomes. Woods and colleagues will then test whether data-driven variation in these biomarkers can be used to identify different trajectories of risk and resilience.
Martha E. Shenton, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Founding Director of the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Rene Kahn, M.D., Ph.D, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, are leading a project creating a data processing, analysis, and coordination center that will integrate and analyze CHR biomarker and clinical data generated by the two multisite research networks as well as key existing CHR-related datasets. Using these data, the researchers plan to develop algorithms that can identify biomarkers that predict CHR outcomes — biomarkers that can then be used to identify clinically useful subtypes of CHR.
Data generated by the research networks will be archived and made publicly available (according to institutional approvals) in the AMP SCZ Program Data Repository within the NIMH Data Archive.
Last Reviewed on May 2, 2022