NIHRDataInsights/HRCSData huggingface dataset:
Title: MRC Non-clinical Research professorship
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: The SGDP Centre was founded in 1994 with the aid of an MRC programme grant and core support was renewed under the new MRC regulations for Centres in 2000. The Centre?s aim is to undertake research on the interplay between genetic, environmental and maturational factors, and their roles in the origins and course of multifactorial mental disorders. To this end the Centre has successfully recruited an unusually broad range of experts (e.g. from psychiatry, social, developmental and cognitive psychology, molecular genetics, quantitative genetics) and facilitated their working together. The existence of the Centre has made possible a wide range of collaborative studies across diverse scientific disciplines that would not otherwise have occurred.The Centre is a partnership between the MRC and Institute of Psychiatry, King?s College London which has made a major investment in the Centre covering approximately 88% of senior salaries and a substantial proportion of administrative and technical staff costs. We have attracted #41.7 million of grants in the past 5 years and hold current grants of #26.3 million of which the Centre grant accounts for just over 3% of the total. Although MRC core funding is a small proportion of total funding, such infrastructural support is not available from any other source, and it has been vital to the growth and cohesion of the Centre. Grant income has increased by 62% - nearly all of this from non-MRC sources - and the total number of staff has increased by 74% ( to 160) over the past 5 years. All staff are now housed under one roof in a new #15-million building following a successful bid to the Joint Infrastructure Fund.The Centre has been highly productive in researching three broad groups of common disorders: externalising disorders, mood disorders and disorders of cognition. Some key findings are listed in chapter 3 and include the first demonstrations of interactions between specific genotypes (functional polymorphisms) and measured environments in the pathogenesis of psychiatric problems.


Research activity codes: 2.1 BIOLOGICAL AND ENDOGENOUS FACTORS;2.2 FACTORS RELATING TO PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: MRC AZ CLD 2018
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: Deficits in impulse control are prominent in a diversity of psychiatric illnesses including bipolar and related mood disorders, and strongly associated with suicidality, relapse to drug-seeking behaviour and pathological gambling. Drug therapies of impulsivity are few, and those available are poorly tolerated as exemplified by lithium. Lithium is the mainstay therapy for bipolar disorder and reduces risk of suicide, but is poorly tolerated and has severe side-effects including renal damage. All this makes a compelling case to develop new impulsivity lowering drugs that have the unique therapeutic profile of lithium without its adverse effects. A leading idea for lithium's mechanism is inhibition of inositol monophosphatase (IMPase), causing reduced transmitter signalling via the phosphoinositide pathway. Recently, we "reprofiled" a library of clinically used drugs and identified an IMPase inhibitor, ebselen, which is an organoselenium compound originally developed as an antioxidant. Ebselen is non-selective and its IMPase action requires selenium, which severely limits chemical optimisation to both improve selectivity and potency, and allow commercial exploitation. However, as ebselen is safe in man it has potential for fast-tracking to clinical trial. With MRC DPFS funding we have established a developmental pathway and progressed ebselen from preclinical studies and experimental medicine models predictive of efficacy and target engagement, through to imminent clinical trials in bipolar disorder. We are now well-positioned to advance through this pipeline the next generation inhibitors of IMPase that have greater selectivity and potency than ebselen, and greater asset (IP) value. The support of the MRC/AZ CLD to target IMPase, combined with our drug development pipeline, will accelerate the clinical development of this new generation of IMPase inhibitors as safe lithium-mimetics for the treatment of patients characterised by poor impulse control.


Research activity codes: 5.1 PHARMACEUTICALS
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: Leveraging routinely collected and linked research data to study the causes and consequences of common mental disorders
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: Our vision is to link consented research studies and genomic resources with clinical and administrative data to create a structured secure infrastructure for studies into the causes and consequences of psychiatric disorders. Our ambition to implement this infrastructure across the whole of the UK. We seek to accomplish our initial aims in Edinburgh, where there is world-leading health informatics, rich data resources covering the whole lifespan and a multidisciplinary environment with access to domain-specific knowledge and expertise. Our application builds upon key MRC and charitable investments, such as the Farr Network, HDR-UK, DPUK and important recent developments in Edinburgh such as the Bayes Institute and the ‘City Deal’ (£1Bn funding). A participant-unique NHS identifier is in universal use throughout Scotland, where there is existing and rapidly developing NHS and academic medical informatics capacity on which to build resources and expertise specifically in mental health. There are rich data resources, including prospective cohorts covering the whole lifespan, population-wide datasets, studies covering specific patient and at-risk groups and developing biorepositories. This combination of infrastructure and resources makes Edinburgh’s potential for mental health data science without parallel in the UK. An Edinburgh-based MRC Data Pathfinder award would facilitate a step-change in multidisciplinary mental health research, including collaborators and disciplines from throughout the UK. Our Pathfinder, in collaboration with other award holders, will form a major component of a future UK Mental Health Platform.


Research activity codes: 2.4 SURVEILLANCE AND DISTRIBUTION;2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY)
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: Cohorts as Platforms for Mental Health research (CaP:MH)
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: We will enhance two of the UK’s premier population based birth cohorts to create an intergenerational, integrated resource for mental health research with an unparalleled capacity to consider the importance of the early life course. This resource will be readily discoverable and available through a proven secure informatics platform with the flexibility to incorporate other cohorts as part of a larger resource. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) and the Born in Bradford (BiB) cohorts together include over 40,000 participants across three generations. Both cohorts are deeply phenotyped through clinic and questionnaire assessments and further enhanced through multi-omic measures and linkage to routine health and social records. We will extend this linkage to a comparable level in both cohorts particularly to primary care patient records ensuring this is higher than in any comparable study based on the multiple strategies we have developed and the strengths of our underlying ethical and technical infrastructure. To this resource we will add additional measures from internet based applications and social media feeds underpinned by our expertise in data science and our strengths in participant engagement. Indicative projects, both individually in each cohort and across the integrated cross-cohort resource, will demonstrate value in enabling mental health discovery. In these projects we will further develop and deploy innovative bioinformatic and biostatistical approaches to facilitate discovery and strengthen causal inference developed in our MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit to maximise the value that existing information can add to observational research. We will build on ALSPAC’s established, sustainable infrastructure for secure, cost-efficient data sharing based on our own instance of the UK Secure E-research Platform (UKSeRP), extending this to include BiB and providing the foundation of a Mental Health Data Platform to support discovery science and service evaluation at a scale that will underpin our ability to understand and effectively improve mental health in individuals and the population.


Research activity codes: 2.4 SURVEILLANCE AND DISTRIBUTION;2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY)
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: MytHICAL- Mental Health Informatics in Children, Adolescents and young adults How do my feelings become numbers?
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: Swansea University (SU) has established an international reputation as a leader in health informatics, reflecting significant RCUK and Government investment (SAIL Databank, Farr, ADRC). Our ambition is to become a UK hub for data-driven, internationally-relevant research to improve children and young people’s mental health (MH). SU is particularly strong in population health research, data sharing platforms (e.g. UKSeRP), innovative governance and a collaborative ethos that underpins our many multidisciplinary research activities. Our key strengths in MH research lies in our advanced data science and informatics infrastructure and cross-disciplinary expertise. Data science at SU has contributed much to MH research by linking diverse datasets for in-depth exploration of aetiology and the role of bio-psycho-social determinants of MH, bringing together cross-disciplinary research and data at scale, and solving problems inherent in standardisation and validation. This Award will build on our experience hosting the MQ Adolescent Data Platform, creating electronic and hybrid e-cohorts, phenotype validation, pharmaco epidemiology, and genetic and conceptual work. It will give widespread access to new Development and Well-Being Assessment and childhood maltreatment data, educational data linked to disorder-specific cohorts, health, environmental and social media data, and new partnerships with paediatricians, geographers, computer scientists and psychiatrists. We aim to extend our expertise through studies with focussed validation and preparation of novel data and high quality transferable metadata, making future MH informatics studies more deeply phenotyped and more efficiently executed. In short, we will place children and young people within settings that may influence their MH using electronic data to better understand the causes of the causes. We will achieve this through up to eight studies to address the key challenges of mental health informatics.


Research activity codes: 2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY)
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: Integrating genetic, clinical and phenotypic data to advance stratification, prediction and treatment in mental health.
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: Mental ill health has a major impact on patients, their carers and the wider community. Psychiatric disorders are estimated to cost the UK economy £70-100 Bn per year. Recently, large scale data sharing has allowed major progress to bemade in understanding the genetic basis of many major psychiatric disorders. The MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (MRC CNGG) in Cardiff has played a leading role in driving this genomic progress. Key insights that have emerged include the polygenic nature of these conditions, the extensive overlap of risk across current diagnostic categories, and the convergence of risk factors onto specific biological processes. These advances in genetics offer major opportunities for improving stratification and treatment responses in mental disorders, as well as for the development of new biomarkers and biological models. However, to capitalise on this progress there is now a need to extend this large-scale data-driven approach forward by integrating genetic information with clinical, environmental, developmental and biological data at scale in mental health to transform the management of psychiatric disorders. Our overall vision is to build key components of a platform that will enable the extension of the collaborative efforts seen in psychiatric genetics into the clinical and biological platforms required for fundamental progress in psychiatric disorders. Our proposed programme comprises 4 Workstreams to achieve these aims: Workstream (WS) 1. Development of a platform for integrating genomic and phenotypic data across large patient cohorts, including with electronic health records. WS 2. Development of a school-based adolescent cohort for identifying the antecedents of early-onset psychiatric disorder. WS 3. Developing a platform for advancing electrophysiological imaging biomarkers in mental health disorders. WS 4. Establishing methodologies for data sharing and standardisation in neuronal cellular model systems.


Research activity codes: 1.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (UNDERPINNING);2.4 SURVEILLANCE AND DISTRIBUTION;2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY);4.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (DETECTION)
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: MICA: Mental Health Data Pathfinder: University of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, and Microsoft
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: With strong NHS partnerships and recent contributions to national mental health (MH) informatics, we shall add novel methods, epidemiology and phenotyping to the MH Platform. We envisage a modular pipeline that de-identifies MH data; supports flexible consent for sharing/contact; and links MH, cognitive, physical, psychosocial and biomarker data. Project (P) 1. Our open-source tools de-identify clinical records to create CPFT’s Research Database, supporting research and participation. We shall extend them to generate anonymised subsets and link data from consenting patients across MH/community services, acute care, and research organizations, including from existing deeply phenotyped longitudinal cohorts. We emphasize rigorous interface standards and NHS governance over identifiable/pseudonymised data. We shall collaborate on a national natural language processing framework, allowing NHS/research organizations to generate structured data from free text. P2. We have created novel open-source neuropsychiatric assessment software. We shall extend it for broad and integrated NHS and research use. This will take automated cognitive testing into routine clinical practice. As a bold but tractable exemplar with research and clinical applications, we shall use it to apply electronic diagnostic algorithms and neuropsychiatric phenotyping, and link these detailed data to clinical records and biomarkers that include immunophenotyping. P3. We shall apply P1 tools to a public health crisis: the premature death of those with serious mental illness. We shall link MH, national and acute Trust data and use machine learning to develop early predictors of mortality. P4. We shall democratize MH research though broad consultation on generic tiered consent models for data-sharing and participation, by giving the research database direct clinical interfaces, and by enhancing data visualization to help clinicians and service users develop research and the NHS improve local services.


Research activity codes: 2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY);4.2 EVALUATION OF MARKERS AND TECHNOLOGIES;4.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (DETECTION)
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: KCL Application for a Mental Health Data Pathfinder award
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience is the largest academic centre for mental health research in Europe, and has built up key strengths and leadership in clinical informatics using the rich data contained within mental health electronic records, in psychosis outcome prediction, and in longitudinal studies of mental health in childhood and adolescence. Building on our extensive experience and resources in these areas, we will deliver projects to provide the necessary groundwork for a world-leading national mental health research platform. Project 1 will take a range of algorithms already used at KCL and develop them for implementation in any electronic mental health record, generating protocols to enhance and render available research- and clinically-relevant data from secondary care. Project 2 will facilitate data linkages in a future platform by setting up a proof-of-principle service to ‘network’ individually negotiated healthcare linkages (with National Pupil Database education records in this case study), enabling the transition from single- to multi-site research. Project 3 will design and pilot a transferable model for monitoring treatment response in first episode psychosis, nested within routine clinical care, by harmonising, standardising and integrating clinical, biological and imaging data. Project 4 will develop and pilot a portable digital platform for recruiting and retaining school-aged mental health cohorts. The projects will be implemented by a co-applicant team that mixes senior, long-established academics at KCL with recently attracted experts and a cadre of future leaders, thus contributing both experience and potential to the national platform. We additionally draw on longstanding national collaborations and partnerships in data science applied to mental health research.


Research activity codes: 2.4 SURVEILLANCE AND DISTRIBUTION;2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY);6.9 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (TREATMENT EVALUATION)
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: MICA: Application for a Mental Health Data Pathfinder award (Oxford)
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: Making data findable and interoperable, adding value to existing datasets and enriching data collection from person-centric and patient reported measures represents the most valuable opportunity to accelerate understanding and improved treatment of mental health conditions. Building on our experience of leading national and international programmes enabling access, interoperability and reuse of data for mental health - including the platform enabling use of Electronic Medical Records for mental health across England (CRIS), the platform for data aggregation for dementia (DPUK) and the pan-European platform to enable data interoperability from cohort and real-world data (EMIF) we propose here a programme of work including underpinning themes and four indicative projects. These projects will gain from the linkage we propose to establish between routine care data and primary, secondary, schools and cohort data and will use devices to collect data remotely ranging from patient reported outcome measures to cognition, sleep and behaviour. To these enormous volumes of data, including the full mental health medical records from 10k people we have already linked to UK Biobank and the generation of 10k proteomes linked to mental health records, plus the streaming data from connected devices, we will bring advanced analytics from the Mathematics Institute and Natural Language Processing from computer scientists using neural networks. All our work will be enveloped in a governance and ethics stream with patient and public involvement. We leverage more than £40m in existing grant funding plus new cash and in-kind contribution from industry partners of over £12m. The outcome will be an informatics supported platform for experimental medicine, increased understanding and development of novel therapeutics for depression and a bold drive to determine the relationship between intervention and outcome in mental wellbeing in young people. These themes and proposed projects will work with our proposed partners to establish the preparatory work for a platform for Mental Health Data capitalising on the unique opportunities presented by the NHS, by strengths in mental health research and by outstanding digital sciences in the UK and in Oxford.


Research activity codes: 1.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (UNDERPINNING);2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY);4.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (DETECTION)
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH
Title: Glasgow Application for a Mental Health Data Pathfinder award
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: There are substantial opportunities in Scotland to develop health informatics and routine data linkage to investigate the determinants and outcomes of mental health disorders. The University of Glasgow has an internationally-recognised record for informatics research, an established local and national infrastructure for data linkage, and strong partnerships with the NHS, third sector organisations and both local and national government. Our goal is to demonstrate the utility and versatility of routine data by developing our work further within both clinical and population-level cohorts. We will use two main approaches: linkage of primary data sources to secondary data; and development of mental health eCohorts. Four exemplar projects within this framework are proposed: 1. Developing the West of Scotland Psychosis Clinical Information System as a resource for future epidemiological and pharmacogenomic research, with a focus on the interface between physical and mental health; 2. Establishing a Scotland-wide Schools Health Research Network to facilitate large-scale adolescent mental health research and innovation in schools; 3. Extending the Scottish Learning Disabilities Observatory’s neurodevelopmental eCohort linkages of the annual Pupil Census and Scotland’s Census 2011 - across a range of cross-sectoral education, health and social datasets - to study a broader range of physical, mental and educational outcomes; and 4. Extending several current Scotland-wide mental health data linkage projects, including assessing the potential for repurposing antihypertensives as treatments for mood and cognitive disorders and exploiting the unique ‘SHARE’ population register for pharmacogenomics work in bipolar disorder. Overall, Glasgow is extremely well placed to deliver several high quality mental health informatics and data linkage projects which will feed directly into a future UK Mental Health Platform.


Research activity codes: 2.4 SURVEILLANCE AND DISTRIBUTION;2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY)
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH