MOST-Nexus: Transforming Global Youth Mental Health with Hyper-Personalised, Adaptive Scalable Digital Care

Year of award: 2025

Grantholders

  • Prof Ulrich Reininghaus

    University of Heidelberg, Germany

  • Mr Rafi Armanto

    Orygen, Australia

  • Prof Mario Alvarez-Jimenez

    Orygen Youth Health, Australia

  • Dr Imogen Bell

    University of Melbourne, Australia

  • Mr Jon Myer

    Orygen, Australia

  • Prof Therese van Amelsvoort

    Maastricht University, Netherlands

  • Prof John Gleeson

    Australian Catholic University, Australia

  • Prof dr Arne Popma

    Amsterdam UMC, Netherlands

  • Prof Cathrine Mihalopoulos

    Monash University, Australia

  • Dr Zongyuan Ge

    Monash University, Australia

  • Dr Covadonga Díaz-Caneja

    Default Community Account

  • Dr Jennifer Nicholas

    University of Melbourne, Australia

  • Dr Isabelle Scott

    University of Melbourne, Australia

  • Dr Shane Cross

    Orygen, Australia

Project summary

Digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) offer a promising solution to the youth mental health (YMH) crisis, but poor engagement limits real-world scalability, sustainability, service integration, and impact. MOST (Moderated Online Social Therapy), a multi-award-winning platform co-designed with young people and services, is a proven effective and scalable solution. Now integrated into 400+ YMH services, it combines evidence-based therapy, peer support, and remote clinical care. To scale MOST globally, we will tackle four key challenges: 1. Delivering scalable, data-driven personalisation. 2. Balancing human support and cost-effectiveness 3. Bridging the research-to-real-world gap. 4. Developing innovative, sustainable models. Driven by world-class research, industry, and lived experience (LE) experts, we will leverage our unique infrastructure to create, evaluate, and scale MOST-Nexus, the world’s first hyper-personalised, adaptive digital platform for YMH. Phase 1 will create MOST-Nexus, integrating AI-driven hyper-personalisation (Work Package (WP)1) and optimising human support (WP2) for enhanced engagement, cost-effectiveness and real-world scalability. Phase 2 will adapt and evaluate MOST-Nexus internationally (WP3; Netherlands, Germany, Spain), and build a sustainable model for global expansion and equity (WP4). MOST-Nexus will transform YMH outcomes globally, delivering a scalable, cost-effective solution that integrates with overstretched services and operates independently in low-resource settings, driving the next generation of DMHIs.