A research program to reduce suicidal thoughts and behaviours in young people, and a project to bring personalised medicine to psychosis treatment, have secured major new funding this week – with over $3.6 million awarded to Orygen researchers to drive innovation and change in youth mental health.
The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants will support Orygen leaders Professor Jo Robinson and Dr Sidhant Chopra to continue their vital work to improve the lives and health of young people and their families.
Lives on the line: Youth suicide prevention in the digital age
This program, led by Head of the Suicide Prevention Research Unit at Orygen, Prof. Robinson, has been awarded almost $3 million and is comprised of three integrated workstreams aimed at better understanding suicide-related behaviour, developing more effective interventions, and implementing and evaluating these interventions at scale.
Prof. Robinson said that despite increasing rates of suicide-related thoughts and behaviour, particularly in young women and girls, suicide prevention efforts were hampered by a number of factors.
“We currently don’t have a comprehensive understanding of suicide-related thoughts and behaviours that brings together social determinants and individual risk factors, and that examines how these risks change over time,” Prof. Robinson said.
“We also have a healthcare system that cannot meet demand, and we’re seeing young people seeking support in other places – whether that’s school or social media, AI companions or other digital supports – often without adequate safeguards in place.
“While many suicide prevention programs have been developed to meet young people where they are, there is a failure of implementation which must be addressed, so that support gets to young people when and where they really need it.”
The program will generate new understandings of suicide-related thoughts and behaviours, as well as translational tools and resources that can be delivered across settings (such as schools) at scale. It will also build research capacity, collaborations and partnerships and inform guidance for policy and practice.
Using breakthroughs in neuroscience to improve psychosis treatment
Led by McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in Clinical Neuroscience at Orygen, Dr Sidhant Chopra, this project focuses on developing and better understanding medications for psychosis, and has been awarded almost $700,000 in funding from the NHMRC.
Dr Chopra said that currently, people experiencing psychosis are prescribed antipsychotic medications using a largely trial-and-error approach, and this situation needs to change.
“My vision is a world where people with psychosis receive personalised treatment that improves their quality of life,” Dr Chopra said.
“Currently, the antipsychotic medications prescribed are only effective in around 50 per cent of people, and many experience debilitating side effects while getting no benefit from the treatment.
“Developing new, better drugs has stalled because we lack a fundamental understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms of antipsychotics, forcing reliance on a failing, serendipitous model of discovery – we need to get the basics right so we can move forward.”
The research program will build the world’s largest clinically-actionable psychosis neuroimaging databank to discover and test promising biomarkers related to treatment response, and will use ultra-high-resolution brain imaging (7T MRI) to identify new antipsychotic drugs based on how they impact the brain.
Together, these research themes will shift the paradigm of antipsychotic selection from trial-and-error to personalised, brain-based medicine, enabling clinicians to select the right treatment for the right person, and paving the way for next-generation therapies.