Active Mental Health Brain & Nervous System

GlobalMinds

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation Akrivia Health
Funding £20.9M
Period Jul 2024 — Jul 2029

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A 100,000-person research programme is building a national bioresource to develop new treatments for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, with the first 11,000 patients recruited by July 2024. This matters because psychiatry lacks the precision tools that have transformed other areas of medicine. Treatments for severe mental illness are often trial-and-error, and many patients do not respond to existing drugs. The programme, called GlobalMinds, aims to change that by linking detailed clinical data with genetic and protein-level information from a very large cohort. It will apply long-read genome sequencing and proteomic analysis to 10,000 participants, alongside short-read sequencing for the core 89,000. If successful, the resource could allow researchers to identify biological subtypes of these conditions and match patients to treatments more effectively. The project also builds a centralised digital hub—the GlobalMinds Hub—to support a national self-referral recruitment model, moving away from overstretched NHS clinical services. This infrastructure will enable frictionless deployment of digital tools like mobile apps and wearables, making it easier to collect real-world data and keep the resource growing and useful over time.

View original technical description
GlobalMinds is a 100,000 subject research programme with the goal of creating a precision psychiatry bioresource to enable the development of novel treatment options for the most challenging conditions in psychiatry. It was initiated by Akrivia Health, Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Cardiff University in Q1 2022, and plans to recruit the first 11,000 patients by July 2024. Akrivia Health is seeking funding from Wellcome to support the creation of the GlobalMinds data resource and its associated digital infrastructure, focused on three condition areas: major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and psychosis/schizophrenia. Funding will enable transition to a national self- referral recruitment campaign, moving the programme away from reliance on under-resourced NHS clinical research services. Funding will also help the programme capitalize on recent technological advances in long-read genome sequencing and proteomic analysis, applying these to a sub-cohort of 10,000 participants in addition to the core 89,000 participant cohort providing short-read sequencing data. Finally, Wellcome funding will support creation of the GlobalMinds Hub, a centralised digital gateway to support the national recruitment model, increase transparency and participant engagement in research, and provide infrastructure for frictionless deployment of digital data collection tools (e.g., mobile apps, wearables) that will enhance the GlobalMinds data resource over time.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Benjamin Fell (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Speeding-up genetic neurodegenerative disease research through sequencing standardisation, cross-border patient recruitment and new geographically-diverse datasets.
Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI)
The South Wales and South West England Mental Health Platform Hub
The Open Psychiatry Project: a co-produced web interface and platform for mental health omic data and federated data analysis
MindPsy: A culturally sensitive transdiagnostic XR mental health app to prevent mental health decline, prioritise waitlists, and save the UK economy 385M/year

Original classification

Discretionary Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.