Neuroimmune profiling for psychosis study: NIPPY

A blood test or brain scan could one day determine whether a person with psychosis will respond to immune-based treatments. Current psychiatric diagnosis relies on symptoms, not biology. This means patients with fundamentally different underlying causes of psychosis—some driven by immune dysfunction, others not—receive the same treatments, often with poor results. The NIPPY study aims to build and test a clinical infrastructure for "neuroimmune profiling": a systematic way to measure immune dysfunction in people with schizophrenia at different stages of illness, compared to healthy controls. If successful, this feasibility work would lay the groundwork for a future where immune therapies are targeted only at those patients whose psychosis has an immune origin. The potential impact is a shift from trial-and-error psychiatry to biologically informed treatment selection. This could reduce the number of patients cycling through ineffective antipsychotic medications, and open the door to repurposing existing anti-inflammatory drugs for a subset of schizophrenia patients. The research is focused on building the diagnostic framework itself—not yet testing therapies—but without this profiling infrastructure, precision immune treatments for psychosis cannot reach the clinic.