Cardiff University teams up with Takeda to treat psychiatric disorders

Cardiff University has formed a collaboration with pharmaceutical company Takeda to work on new drugs for treating schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

The collaboration will combine Cardiff University’s large-scale genomic data and expertise in psychiatric genetics with Takeda’s drug discovery and clinical development capabilities.

Professor Lawrence Wilkinson, scientific director of the Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute (NMHRI) who will co-lead the partnership at Cardiff, said: “Recent developments in psychiatric genetics and genomics, combined with advances in neuroscience, mean there is now a real prospect of overcoming the obstacles that have held back progress in developing new drugs for psychiatric disorders.”

“Takeda’s expertise in successful drug discovery will enable our ambition to use our research to find better treatments for common brain disorders with high levels of unmet need.”

Takeda will be given access to biological psychiatry research across the university, including the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetic and Genomics, NMHRI, National Centre for Mental Health, and the Brain Repair and Intracranial Neurotherapeutics Unit.

“By working in partnership with world-leading scientific and clinical neuropsychiatric experts at Cardiff University we have a unique opportunity to create a new wave of medicines, that are grounded in the genomic understanding of the disease, for patients suffering from schizophrenia and related psychiatric disorders,” said Ceri Davies, head of the Neuroscience Drug Discovery Unit at Takeda.

Schizophrenia affects around 23 million people worldwide and typically begins in early adulthood, according the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Professor Sir Michael Owen, director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics said: “Therapeutic progress for these conditions has been limited by a lack of understanding of their primary causes, however major genetic advances in the last decade, many of which have been led by Cardiff University, have provided new and reliable insights into their biological causation. With our partner Takeda we have an unprecedented opportunity to develop novel therapeutic approaches for neuropsychiatric disorders.”