We kicked off 2025 with an excellent meeting in Frankfurt as part of the
ECNP Precision Psychiatry Roadmap initiative. Over 150 people from around the world joined us in Frankfurt, with more than 700 registered online participants. The interest and appetite for progress on moving ahead with precision psychiatry were very clear to see.
The meeting focused on the challenges and opportunities in the field of biomarker development and validation for mental disorders. Following an excellent keynote lecture by Kim Q. Do, ten world-leading experts in the field addressed the state of the research and current initiatives during three meeting sessions on biomarker selection and validation, subtyping patient populations, and targeted interventions in stratified patient groups.
The meeting took on some big questions: (1) how to select and validate relevant biomarkers for mental health conditions; (2) how to reach consensus on the predictive validity from emerging data; and (3) how to operationalise new knowledge into a biology-informed framework for mental disorders to deliver precision diagnostics and treatments.
With a panel discussion following each of the sessions, representatives from all the different parts of the puzzle gave their perspectives, including patients, academics, regulators, industry professionals and funders. From these discussions it became clear that making precision psychiatry a reality will require a co-ordinated effort from across the global stakeholder community.
The necessity of action though was clear and the first signs of what a co-ordinated plan might look like have also started to emerge. To make the Roadmap work we will need to take measured, incremental steps as a field together. The journey envisaged will be a long one, but the time has come and the will is there. After this meeting, we are definitely on the road!
As an outcome, a summary report of the meeting, with synopses of the lectures, recommendations and next steps, will be generated and published. We are very much looking forward to starting to work together on these next steps and will push them forward at the
ECNP New Frontiers Meeting in Nice in March, where we will be discussing, as part of the Roadmap initiative, the potential for targeting neural circuits in psychiatry. Note that it is still possible to
register for online participation. I hope to see you there!