Our Mission
About Us
Our Mission
The Psychiatry Consortium provides opportunities for funding, collaboration and knowledge exchange – to drive innovation in psychiatric drug discovery.
Scale and Impact
The scale and impact of mental illness across society is huge. One in ten children, and one in four adults (approx. 15 million people) experience mental illness each year, affecting their wellbeing, relationships, and potential ability to work. The economic and social cost has been estimated as £105bn a year in England alone. New treatments are needed urgently. However, the lack of novel drug targets combined with the challenge of validating them pre-clinically, and the high failure rate in clinical trials have led to a reduced investment in drug discovery and development in the last decade and there have been no new effective types of treatment for over 30 years.
However, there is good news too:
Our aims
The Psychiatry Consortium partners will share the high risks inherent in drug discovery and, as a collective, will aim to:
- engage the psychiatry academic community globally by providing opportunities for funding, collaboration & access to industry and commercialisation know-how
- work collaboratively with academia to identify and validate novel therapeutic targets and strategies to treat psychiatric diseases
- increase the number of new targets and screening assays, validated to industry standards, to support the discovery and development of new drugs
