Associated organisationsCharité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin · Ecrin-Erc · Erasmus University Rotterdam · Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare · King's College London · Medical University of Vienna · San Raffaele University · University of Aarhus · Vall d'Hebron University HospitalEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£11.7M
PeriodJul 2024 — Jul 2028
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Clinical trials for depression are currently run one at a time, each with its own infrastructure that gets dismantled afterwards—a slow, inefficient, and expensive process that has left psychiatry lagging behind fields like oncology in getting new treatments approved. This matters because most depression trials are too small to produce reliable results, and the fragmented approach makes it nearly impossible to compare treatments across different studies. The result is a bottleneck: few new drugs reach patients, and those that do may have weak evidence behind them. The EU-PEARL project proposes building a reusable, multinational platform trial for depression—a shared infrastructure where multiple new and repurposed treatments can be tested simultaneously against a single control group, with new treatments added over time. This model, already proven in cancer research, could cut costs, reduce the number of patients needed as controls, and generate statistically robust data much faster. If successful, this would transform the clinical trial infrastructure for mental health. Instead of starting from scratch for every drug, researchers would plug new treatments into an existing, open collaborative system—accelerating regulatory approvals and giving clinicians clearer evidence on which antidepressants actually work.
View original technical description
Clinical trials are at the core of evidence based medicine. However, in psychiatry, the trials conducted often fail to inform clinical practice because many are underpowered. Moreover, the number of new regulatory approvals in psychiatry has consistently lagged behind other areas of medicine, such as oncology, infectious diseases, or neurology. Treatments are usually evaluated in individual trials, with participants randomized to the intervention or a control group, each trial conducted in a specific setting and requiring its own infrastructure, which is dismantled after completion of the trial. This approach is slow and not very efficient and limits comparability across trials. In contrast, a platform trial uses a shared infrastructure for many treatments, a shared control group, and allows new treatments to be added over time. This approach can increase the speed by which data on safety and efficacy can be obtained, reduce operational costs and participant burden, and increase statistical power. Platform trials have successfully been used in fields like oncology. In this application, we are proposing a similar approach for the mental health field by building a reusable multinational infrastructure, operated by an open collaborative consortium, to run an integrated platform trial for new and repurposed treatments for depression.
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