Consortium launches to create drugs for mental health conditions

A new drug discovery consortium has been launched to help meet therapeutic needs for psychiatric symptoms affecting people with mental health conditions and dementia.

The Psychiatry Consortium has been launched by Medicines Discovery Catapult, MQ: Transforming mental health and Alzheimer’s Research UK, with support by the Wellcome Trust.  

The consortium will aim to foster new research approaches in an effort to revitalise psychiatric drug discovery. The consortium’s partners aim to provide approximately £3 million in research funding over three-years with the hope of delivering up to 10 high-value drug discovery projects.

The collaborators also state it will provide a mechanism to “pull-through” academic ideas and validate them to industry standards, enabling their pre-clinical development, and ultimately translation to clinic.

In the UK, dementia is the leading cause of death and affects over 850,000 people, costing £26 billion a year. However, between 2016 – 2017, the UK government only allocated 4.5% of medical research to dementia.

More so, over the last 10 years there has been a dramatic fall in psychiatric drug discoveries, in part due to high failure rates of clinical trials in the field.

The Psychiatric Consortium comes at a time where mental health has been a greater societal and governmental focus.

Dr Carol Routledge, director of Research of Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “People living with dementia don’t just experience memory problems, many also face challenging behavioural symptoms such as anxiety and aggression. While we continue to fund research into disease-modifying treatments, it is vital that we also look for drugs that help relieve psychiatric symptoms associated with dementia, and the Psychiatry Consortium will help accelerate the progress of these desperately needed medicines.”

Dr Eva Wolbert, senior portfolio manager of MQ: Transforming mental health, added: “At the moment, too many people living with a mental illness are going without the effective help they need. There has been a dearth of innovation in drug treatments with most drugs developed in the 1970’s and 80’s and many being associated with varying degrees of unwanted side effects. This Psychiatry Consortium is an important step in stimulating much-needed advances in the area. Throughout the process, MQ will ensure that people affected by mental illness are at the heart of the research funded.”