Unlocking the potential of precision mental health: a pilot investigation focused on schizophrenia

Precision medicine has brought healthcare into a new era in pursuit of highly specific diagnoses and treatment tailored to patients’ characteristics. Advanced tools and technology are nowadays used to support stratification of patients into small subgroups that receive different benefits from their treatment. Incorporating precision medicine approaches into clinical practice has thus become a priority. This has further transformed how clinical trials should be conducted, which moves away from the conventional one-size-fits-all approach. Many innovative statistical methods have been developed for precision medicine clinical trials, with successful application to areas including oncology and immunology. By contrast, mental health is a specialty that has not yet benefited from the revolutionary change in the paradigm of developing new interventions.

In this project, we set the focus onto schizophrenia, a mental disorder that encompasses a diverse type of symptoms, affecting 24 million people worldwide. Evidence has further shown the symptoms respond differently to the same treatment, and immune dysfunction may offer new actionable targets for developing new treatments. There is critical need to better understand how future treatments for schizophrenia may be developed and evaluated, for which advanced statistical methodology has a big role to play.

In collaboration with leading psychiatrists, we will work to identify opportunities and barriers of applying a selected set of precision medicine trials methodology to design schizophrenia trials. Two focus group meetings involving patient representatives and carers will be conducted to inform the effective data collection (for instance, how symptoms can be best measured over time) and potential decisions to make during the course of, or after, a trial.