ECNP Roadmap Meeting on Precision Psychiatry 2025

20-21 January 2025, Frankfurt, Germany

Making precision psychiatry a reality

Innovations in psychiatry precision diagnostics and treatment strategies: from recognition to implementation

As part of its consensus Roadmap initiative for building a new diagnostic framework for mental disorders, ECNP will be organising a one-and-a-half-day meeting to discuss the development and implementation of novel targeted therapies in psychiatry on all fronts. Where previous meetings have focused predominantly on the research methodologies and the scientific rationale of precision psychiatry, this meeting aims to address the challenges and opportunities associated with making precision psychiatry a practical reality.

ECNP Roadmap Meeting 2025 Recognising the broad implications for the treatment of brain disorders, all relevant stakeholders will be involved – from regulatory authorities, industry and the medical community, to health technology assessment professionals, patient advocacy groups, payer systems, and policymakers. Multistakeholder presentations and discussions are planned to review the current status of the uptake of innovations in psychiatry, assess the implementation challenges facing precision psychiatry approaches – from clinical development, trial design and regulatory pathways, to reimbursement and the complexities of the psychiatric care environment – and explore how our advancing understanding of mechanisms of action are opening up new research and treatment horizons.

In this way, we aim to further strengthen the value of innovation in psychiatry by bringing together international discussions across the global community and ensuring that scientific progress is shared at all levels of the mental health system.

Registration for virtual participation is open!

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Meet the speakers


Ewa Bałkowiec-Iskra, Poland Ewa Bałkowiec-Iskra is member of the EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP). Head of the Laboratory of Pain Neuropharmacology at the Medical University of Warsaw, she is also a member of the Medicinal Products Committee of the Polish Office for Registration of Medicinal Products, Medical Devices and Biocidal Products. Her research area is neuro-immune interactions, with a specific focus on the two model systems of autoimmune encephalomyelitis and inflammatory pain.	Derek Buhl, United States Derek Buhl is a scientific director in Neuroscience Precision Medicine at AbbVie. A neurophysiologist and systems neuroscientist, his work focuses on the development of translational, circuit-based biomarkers and the validation of novel digital tools for remote clinical monitoring, primarily in schizophrenia, mood, and sleep disorders. Read more


Kim Q. Do, Switzerland Kim Q. Do is professor of translational psychiatry at Lausanne University, Switzerland, and the former director of the Centre for psychiatric neuroscience at Lausanne University Hospital. Her work focuses on bridging basic neurobiology and clinical investigation to understand the causes and mechanisms of psychosis. Read more	Wayne C. Drevets, United States Wayne Drevets is vice president and mood disease area leader, neuroscience, at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine. Formerly chief of the section of neuroimaging in mood and anxiety disorders at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), his work focuses on neuroimaging in psychiatry and the functional neuroanatomical correlates of the normal and diseased brain. Read more


Peter Falkai, Germany Peter Falkai is chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at LMU Munich and director of the hospital at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. His research focus is the neurobiology and treatment of psychotic disorders, especially schizophrenia, using techniques ranging from functional imaging to gene expression in human post-mortem-tissue. Read more	Shaun Johnson, United Kingdom Shaun Johnson is a board member of the European patient advocacy association GAMIAN-Europe, chair of the Lived Experience Advisory Board of Rethink Mental Illness, a forum for people with lived experience of mental illness, chair of Lamp, a mental health charity, and former member of the board of trustees of Rethink Mental Illness and the mental health charity Mind.


Martien Kas, The Netherlands Martien Kas is professor of behavioural neuroscience at the University of Groningen’s Institute for evolutionary life sciences and president of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP). He is also an editorial board member of Mammalian Genome and project co-ordinator of the IMI-funded PRISM 2 project. Read more	Gitte Moos Knudsen, Denmark Gitte Moos Knudsen is a professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry and Sensory Sciences at Copenhagen University Hospital. Her work focuses on using advanced methodological developments to understand the neurobiology of neurotransmission, with particular emphasis on multimodality (PET, MR) brain imaging and neuropharmacology. She is the past-president of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP). Read more


Nikoalos Koutsouleris, Germany Nikolaos Koutsouleris is professor of precision psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at LMU Munich and group leader of the Precision Psychiatry Group for Precision, International Max Planck Research School for Translational Psychiatry. His research focuses on extracting predictive information from diverse neurobiological, neurocognitive and clinical data for an improved early recognition of functional psychoses. Read more	Rouba Kozak, United States Rouba Kozak is director, Mental Health, at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Mental Health (FNIH). Focused on translational research strategies that aim to accelerate the application of preclinical findings to early clinical development, she has extensive experience in the biopharma industry with precision medicine for brain disorders, including neuro-genomic strategies and biomarker and diagnostics design. Read more


Maria A. Oquendo, United States Maria Oquendo is the Ruth Meltzer professor of psychiatry and chair of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman school of medicine. A former president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), she is the chair of future DSM strategic committee. Her research work applies insights from neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, and global mental health to understand and prevent suicidal behaviour. Read more	Frank J. Padberg, Germany Frank Padberg is professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at the LMU University Hospital in Munich, where he is director of the section of psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy and director of the non-invasive brain stimulation and neuroplasticity laboratory. His research focus is on the development of novel non-pharmacological interventions for difficult-to-treat affective disorders. Read more


Brenda Penninx, The Netherlands Brenda Penninx is professor of psychiatric epidemiology at the department of psychiatry at Amsterdam UMC and leader of the multi-site Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA). She also serves as the vice-president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and is the treasurer of ECNP. Read more	Andreas Reif, Germany Andreas Reif is professor of psychiatry and director of the Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on the biological underpinnings of mental disorders and precision medicine approaches to ADHD, psychoses and neuropsychiatric disorders. He is the president-elect of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP). Read more


Michael Sand, United States Michael Sand is the founder and CEO of S2 Consulting LLC, a specialist drug-development consultancy in Danbury, Connecticut. He previously spent 15 years at Boehringer Ingelheim, most latterly as senior clinical program leader CNS. He has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed abstracts, papers and book chapters, focusing especially on human sexuality. Read more	Carol Tamminga, United States Cariol Tamminga is the Lou and Ellen McGinley Distinguished chair in psychiatric research and the chief of the translational neuroscience division in schizophrenia at the University of Texas Southwestern medical center. Her research focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying schizophrenia, especially its most prominent symptoms, psychosis and memory dysfunction. Read more


Elizabeth Tunbridge, Germany Elizabeth Tunbridge is director of translational neuroscience at Boehringer Ingelheim and honorary research investigator in the department of psychiatry at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on understanding the links between genes and brain dysfunction in order to find new drug targets for psychiatric disorders. Read more

ECNP Roadmap Concept

Current nosology for the diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders separates each disorder often into non-overlapping diagnostic categories. This nosological separation is not based on underlying aetiology but on convention-based clustering of qualitative symptoms of disorders. Yet, overlap in disease symptoms and dimensions across different neuropsychiatric disorders is huge, leading to considerable comorbidity between disorders.

While diagnostic categories are sufficient to provide the basis for general clinical management, they do not describe the underlying neurobiology that gives rise to individual symptoms. The ability to precisely link these symptoms to underlying neurobiology would not only facilitate the development of new and more precise treatments – which are urgently needed given the unsatisfyingly low response and remission rates of current treatments of all modalities – it would also allow physicians to provide patients with a better understanding of the complexities and management of their illness. To realise this ambition, a paradigm shift is needed to build an understanding of how neuropsychiatric conditions can be defined more precisely using quantitative, multimodal biological and environmental processes and parameters and thus to optimise treatment efficacy.

Precision psychiatry has been introduced as a new approach to improve treatment of mental disorders and to develop innovative, mechanism-based treatment strategies beyond the current diagnostic boundaries. At its core, precision psychiatry is an approach that focuses on understanding the underlying neurobiological mechanisms that cause the symptoms of mental health conditions. Using this understanding, it aims to develop therapies that can target these mechanisms, which in turn will address previously untreatable aspects of mental health conditions by providing more specific symptom control and possibly altering the trajectory of the disease process. However, this new approach would result in a radically different diagnostic system, abandoning the classical clinical approach, and posing significant challenges for clinicians, industry, and regulators alike.

The ECNP Roadmap Initiative aims to reach a consensus roadmap for building a new diagnostic framework for mental disorders that will instantiate a set of principles and procedures by which research can continuously improve precision diagnostics. The initiative seeks to achieve global alignment with all stakeholders on the way forward to better define and (longitudinally) measure neuropsychiatric conditions, harmonise (translational) methodologies and data sets across the community, and mobilise resources to implement and validate the framework.