Mental Health Award: Advancing target validation for novel mental health drug discovery

You can apply to this call if you are a team of researchers: 

• from disciplines relevant to drug discovery and mental health science, including but not limited to genomics, computational psychiatry, molecular biology in psychiatry, medical chemistry, neuropharmacology, in-vitro/vivo/silico pharmacology and drug discovery
• from an eligible organisation based anywhere in the world (apart from mainland China)

We encourage applications from teams that:

• are diverse and interdisciplinary, within one or across multiple institutions, with collaborations covering multiple areas of expertise
• include researchers at any stage of their career

This call aims to support research activities to validate novel targets that have a clear therapeutic concept, a strong biological rationale and relevance to early intervention in anxiety, depression and/or psychosis. Successful projects will generate data demonstrating the target’s potential to lead to a clinical benefit, including toxicity risk considerations, and will develop the potential for a drug discovery campaign. Early elimination of non-viable targets is also important to better inform future research hypotheses and experimental designs.  

We define a ‘target’ as a biochemical entity in the body that a drug can bind to, including but not limited to:

• receptors
• proteins
• enzymes
• biomolecules (for example, DNA, RNA, peptides)
• gut microbiome

Target validation must demonstrate that a target is directly involved in a pathophysiological process that leads to the emergence of symptoms. The modulation of the target can also produce a change in the biological pathway and possible clinical efficacy.