Promising approaches in the search for biomarkers of bipolar disorder.

Abstract

World Psychiatry 22:2 June 2023 er discovery. As well, standard data collection protocols should be developed for deep clinical phenotyping, cognitive assessments, biological sampling, and electrophysiological and imaging procedures, to enable pooling of data from centers around the world. The AD Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is an exemplar of such effort. ADNI began in 2004 with substantial publicprivate partnership funding that allowed academ ic centers internationally to standardize data collection and pool data, which led to discovery of biomarkers for AD. Similar initiatives in psychiatry, such as the Establish ing Moderators and Biosignatures of Antidepressant Response for Clinical Care for Depression (EMBARC) project, the Canadian Biomarker Integration Network in Depression (CANBIND), the Personalized Prognostic Tools for Early Psychosis Management (PRONIA) Consortium, and the planned longitudinal cohort study by the recently launched BD Integrated Network, are clearly steps in the right direction. Moreover, industrysponsored phase 2/3 clinical trial programs that ascertain the efficacy of new drugs for psychiatric disorders generate vast amounts of treatment data. These data could be a huge resource for biomarker discovery if the trials implement standardized data collection protocols that include deep clinical phenotyping and biological sampling, and the data are made available for pooling with other networks. Looking to the future, the probability of dis covering diagnostic biomarkers that map precisely to specific DSM5 disorders is very low, given the heterogeneity of the dis orders and the symptom overlap among them. However, the emerging evidence re viewed by AbiDargham et al and the continuing advances in research methods for biomarker discovery offer a ray of hope that susceptibility markers for disease conversion and predictive biomarkers for treatment response will become a future reality in psychiatry.