Details
| Opportunity Name | Mental Health Award |
| Agency | Wellcome Trust |
| Value | Up to £5,000,000 |
| Indirect Costs | TBD |
| Duration | Up to 5 years |
Deadlines
| Notify faculty and SIRI of intention to apply | 03-15-2023 |
| Letter of Intent (LOI) and fully signed ORS checklist due to SIRI for mandatory review | 05-01-2023 |
| LOI and fully signed ORS checklist due to FSc RO at sciapps@yorku.ca for mandatory review | 05-31-2023 |
| LOI due at agency | 06-07-2023, by 5:00PM (BST) |
Objective
This call aims to support validation of biological, psychological, social or digital markers to enable stratification in anxiety and/or depression as early as possible. Stratification will allow targeted treatment and ensure that the right people get the right treatment at the right time.
As part of its new strategic focus, Wellcome Trust (WT) aims to drive a transformative change in the ability to intervene as early as possible in the course of anxiety and depression, broadly defined, in ways prioritised by the people who experience them. This work involves advancing scientific understanding of how brain, body and environment interact in the course and resolution of these conditions; finding new and improved ways to predict, identify, and stratify groups of people so that we can provide more timely and personalized interventions; and finding new and improved ways of intervening.
Wellcome recognises that to make progress we need to bring together an equitable, ethical, diverse and global research community to focus on the value of stratification for mental health. Through this call, WT aims to foster the field of stratification in mental health research by encouraging applications from multi-disciplinary teams from diverse settings, both geographical and in terms of level of resource. We are also looking to encourage equitable collaborations between low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs) so that findings may be applicable globally.
Current mental health diagnostic categories are imperfect, and rely on subjective measures, resulting in significant heterogeneity of people within each diagnostic category, which in turn impacts development and provision of effective interventions. Stratified medicine aims to identify sub-groups of individuals within a heterogenous disease population based upon unique characteristics of each sub-group (strata) such as underlying mechanisms, risk factors, course of disease or treatment responses. A number of different methods can be utilized to measure the unique characteristics of the sub-groups including but not limited to; genetics, biochemical, imaging, clinical scores, socio-demographic characteristics, behavioral or psychological assessments. Use of stratification approaches have the potential to identify the sub-groups of individuals that will benefit most from a targeted pharmacological or non-pharmacological treatment. Furthermore, stratification of people with mental health conditions will enable early intervention with the potential to alter trajectories of these conditions and have maximum impact on people’s lives.
In this call, WT aims to advance stratification in anxiety and/or depression, through funding further validation of promising biological, psychological, social and digital markers, whether alone or in combination with observable or behavioral characteristics, with a goal to enable early identification of sub-groups and targeted treatment.
Eligibility
Full eligibility requirements here.
How to Apply
To signal your intent to apply and to book a one-on-one meeting, please contact Strategic and Institutional Research Initiatives (SIRI), in the Office of Research Services, by e-mail (SIRI@yorku.ca).
Wellcome Trust will host a webinar in early 2023 and the website will be updated with more details by March 1, 2023.