According to the World Health Organisation, mental illnesses such as depression are one of the leading causes of disability across the world – yet there is still huge unmet need for drugs to treat psychiatric disorders.
‘Around one third of people with depression are resistant to current drug therapies, but unfortunately, few new treatments have been successfully developed in the last decades,’ explains Professor Susannah Murphy. ‘Front-line drug development in this area is considered high-risk and commercial companies have not given it the attention that other areas of medicine, such as cancer therapies, have received.’
The Experimental Medicine Industry Partnership (EMIP), based at the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, is now helping commercial companies to translate evidence from pre-clinical models into therapies which can be tested in full-scale human trials – speeding up the rate at which drugs may become available to patients.