Hypatia Health

A patient with depression or anxiety currently has no way of knowing, before trying a treatment, whether it will work for them or why. Psychiatric treatments often fail because clinicians lack tools to connect a patient’s symptoms to the underlying brain mechanisms driving them. Hypatia Health is building a digital platform that closes that gap. The platform gives researchers and clinicians access to computational models that can simulate and predict human behaviour, alongside gamified tasks that generate personalised “computational phenotypes” for each patient. If successful, this could replace the current trial-and-error approach to mental health care with targeted, mechanism-based treatment plans. Clinicians could use interactive games during sessions to identify which cognitive processes are disrupted, then match therapy or medication accordingly. The platform is designed to be simple and consistent across teams, so that findings from one clinic can inform practice in another. This is applied research with a clear practical endpoint: fewer wasted treatment attempts, shorter time to effective care, and a shift from treating symptoms to addressing the causes of mental ill health.