The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the nation’s medical research agency — making important discoveries that improve health and save lives.
The broad goal of this grant program is to support the development and optimization of neurophysiological measures as potential assays for treatment development research. It aims to optimize and evaluate measures of neurophysiological processes that are disrupted within or across mental disorders, involving both healthy humans and another species relevant to the therapeutic development pipeline. The grant will fund initial proof of concept studies for identifying measures that could be developed as preclinical assays for evaluating new drug and device therapies and their targets. Moreover, it focuses on revealing assay measures where the performance between preclinical animal species and humans is dissimilar, establishing a firm basis for limiting speculative extrapolations of preclinical animal findings to humans. The ultimate goal is to improve the efficiency of the therapeutic development process, identifying coherence of measures and inconsistencies between the preclinical screening pipeline and clinical evaluation, thus hastening the development of more effective treatments for mental disorders.