Roadmap for a precision-medicine initiative in the Nordic region

The Nordic region, comprising primarily Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, has many of the necessary characteristics for being at the forefront of genome-based precision medicine. These include egalitarian and universal healthcare, expertly curated patient and population registries, biobanks, large population-based prospective cohorts linked to registries and biobanks, and a widely embraced sense of social responsibility that motivates public engagement in biomedical research. However, genome-based precision medicine can be achieved only through coordinated action involving all actors in the healthcare sector. Now is an opportune time to organize scientists in the Nordic region, together with other stakeholders including patient representatives, governments, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and funding agencies, to initiate a Nordic Precision Medicine Initiative. We present a roadmap for how this organization can be created. The Initiative should facilitate research, clinical trials and knowledge transfer to meet regional and global health challenges.Non peer reviewe

How real-world data can facilitate the development of precision medicine treatment in psychiatry

Precision medicine has the ambition to improve treatment response and clinical outcomes through patient stratification, and holds great potential in mental disorders. However, several important factors are needed to transform current practice into a “precision psychiatry” framework. Most important are (1) the generation of accessible large real-world training and test data including genomic data integrated from multiple sources, (2) the development and validation of advanced analytical tools for stratification and prediction, and (3) the development of clinically useful management platforms for patient monitoring that can be integrated into healthcare systems in real-life settings. This narrative review summarizes strategies for obtaining the key elements – well-powered samples from large biobanks, integrated with electronic health records and health registry data using novel artificial intelligence algorithms – to predict outcomes in severe mental disorders and translate these models into clinical management and treatment approaches. Key elements are massive mental health data and novel artificial intelligence algorithms. For the clinical translation of these strategies, we discuss a precision medicine platform for improved management of mental disorders. We include use cases to illustrate how precision medicine interventions could be brought into psychiatry to improve the clinical outcomes of mental disorders

Meeting Report: Can We Make Animal Models of Human Mental Illness?

Modeling aspects of the human condition in animals has provided invaluable information on the physiology of all organ systems as well as assisted in the development of virtually all new therapeutics. Research in cardiovascular disease, cancer, immunology, and others has benefited substantially from the availability of animal models that capture aspects of specific human diseases and that have been used effectively to advance new treatments. By comparison, animal models for neurological and psychiatric disorders have faced several unique obstacles. This essay highlights topics covered in a recent Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting charged with examining the status of animal models for mental illness. The consensus of the conference is that, despite the difficulties inherent with modeling brain disorders in animals, when used judiciously�fully cognizant that models of specific behavioral or biological aspects cannot completely recapitulate the human disorder, animal research is crucial for advancing our understanding of neuropsychiatric disease