Overview and Goals

 

Schizophrenia and chronic psychosis are among the most disabling disorders affecting adolescents and young adults involving cognitive impairment and reduced vocational achievement.

Recent studies have shown that early psychosis is a window of opportunity to prevent the onset of the disease or its progression to chronicity.

Therefore, the background hypothesis of PsyCARE (“Early Intervention in Psychosis: Towards Preventive and Personalized Psychiatry”) is that promoting neuroprotection and neuroplasticity will improve an individual’s level of resilience and attenuate the negative impact of early developmental disorders when facing stressors during the critical phase of adolescence (between the ages of 12-25).

The main goal of PsyCARE is to improve early intervention for psychosis by providing a new set of easy-to-share tools to:

  1. Facilitate access to care;
  2. Improve early detection;
  3. Provide personalized therapeutic programs.

These early and personalized strategies will enable to tailor therapies to the individual from the earliest stages of the disorder. 

To meet this main goal, the PsyCARE project aims at:

  • Identifying biomarkers to improve diagnosis, disease stage detection and prediction of functional outcome;
  • Identifying a list of targets for disease-modifying strategies;
  • Providing and validating:
    • new portable tools for digital phenotyping in routine practice, including motor assessment, automatic text and speech analysis;
    • an application for personalized cognitive training;
    • a new patient-centered application facilitating case management and patient’s engagement (PsyCARE App);
    • a Decision Support System (DSS) that will guide the customized treatment strategy;
  • Developing an innovative PsyCARE data collection and integration platform tailored to psychiatric research and mental health;
  • Providing a knowledge dissemination and training toolkit to improve awareness and transfer of PsyCARE results to medical practice.

PsyCARE treatment strategies will be tested on a large scale in a multicentric clinical trial of 500 patients with early symptoms of psychosis to evaluate the effect of this early and personalized composite care. Particular attention will be paid to implementing the results of PsyCARE on a national scale and studying their impact on the healthcare system and the care pathway.

 

The PsyCARE project is led by Prof. Marie-Odile Krebs (GHU Paris Psychiatrie et Neurosciences and Université de Paris) and is coordinated by INSERM. It is financed by the RHU action (Hospital-University Research in Health) of the program “Investissements d’Avenir” promoted by the French government and monitored by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR).

It is the first RHU project in the field of psychiatry. It started in January 2020 for a duration of 5 years, with a funding of 8.8 million euros. PsyCARE gathers a national consortium from the Institut de Psychiatrie, which includes academic experts in neuroscience and bioinformatics, and clinical centers of excellence in the field of psychosis (“Transition network”), with the partnership of innovative companies.