The Consortium on Biomarkers in Mental Health took place on February 3 and 4, with the support of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, the Fondation FondaMental, PEPR PROPSY, the French Embassy in the UK, the France 2030 investment plan, the Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration (NIHR) and the Higher Education, Research and Innovation Department.
Two days of exchanges between French and British researchers on international classifications of biomarkers.
The following themes were highlighted :
- reducing the heterogeneity of categorical diagnoses,
- take proper account of psychiatric and somatic disorders,
- providing valid diagnostic entities, enabling the development of effective treatments for mental disorders.
The first day was devoted to blood biomarkers and their potential for refining psychiatric diagnoses. The following day was devoted to the harmonization of infrastructures and the use of large-scale databases.
A Franco-British collaboration is being studied, through public-private partnerships between universities, charities, pharmaceutical companies and technology firms, to set up a joint research program in the two countries, exploit existing data and guarantee harmonized sampling.