Project: IMproved Personalized medicine through deep LEarning in MENTal disorders

Acronym	IMPLEMENT (Reference Number: ERAPERMED2018-127)
Duration	01/03/2019 - 28/02/2022
Project Topic	Psychotic disorders are severe mental illnesses with early onset, frequently chronic course and often lifelong impairment. As a consequence, they cause an enormous healthcare burden, costing close to €100 billion annually in Europe alone. The biology of these illnesses is insufficiently understood and no objective tools exist to aid in diagnosis or treatment selection. This, in turn, leads to long periods of inadequate and ineffective treatment, significantly limiting the opportunity for achieving more optimal clinical outcomes. To address this, IMPLEMENT will develop a translational research framework that identifies biomarkers for treatment-relevant stratification of the most severe psychotic disorder, schizophrenia. Building on known candidates, IMPLEMENT will use advanced machine learning on high-dimensional multi-OMICS and magnetic resonance imaging data to identify illness-associated profiles indexing patient subgroups. Using big data approaches (n > 60,000), IMPLEMENT will explore the impact of developmental processes on the formation of biological subgroups and use clinical studies of both conventional and innovative treatment approaches to tune subgroup profiles towards clinical utility. The IMPLEMENT framework will incorporate preclinical validation to leverage neurobiological understanding and optimize biological subgroup profiles. The clinical utility of these profiles will subsequently be validated in independent clinical samples and prospectively recruited subjects. IMPLEMENT will integrate these efforts with ICT development, to optimize the use of high-dimensional datasets across diverse repositories, to optimally harmonize data for personalized medicine investigations and safeguard patient privacy. Overall, IMPLEMENT will provide the basis for biologically-informed personalized medicine approaches in schizophrenia, addressing an enormous unmet medical need in an area of medicine in which currently no robust clinical stratification tools exist.
Network	ERA PerMed
Call	1st Joint Transnational Call for Proposals (2018)

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Central Institute of Mental Health	Coordinator	Germany
2	Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU)	Partner	Germany
3	University of Oslo	Partner	Norway
4	Erasmus Medical Center	Partner	Netherlands
5	SeqOne S.A.S.	Partner	France
6	Parnassia Antes Groep voor Geestelijk Gezondheidszorg	Partner	Netherlands
7	University of Western Ontario	Partner	Canada