It’s difficult for researchers, funders, people with lived experience, and others with an interest in mental health science to keep track of the ever-expanding literature. How can this information, which is published every day, all over the world, be gathered, analysed, and used effectively to design new research that makes a difference?
The Wellcome Trust-funded global GALENOS project aims to tackle these challenges by creating a continuously updated, comprehensive and trustworthy catalogue and synthesis of the best scientific evidence to allow the mental health community to better identify the research questions that most urgently need to be answered.
By creating datasets and insights that are easy to navigate in a state-of-the-art online resource, this project will accelerate discovery science into effective new interventions, and solutions for the 1 in 4 of us impacted by mental illness.
The Human-Centered Health AI research group supports the GALENOS project by developing the ontology that scaffolds and integrates the extracted and synthesised evidence in a reproducible way, and by developing novel trustworthy AI approaches to automate tracking and synthesising published evidence.
2023
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New living evidence resource of human and non-human studies for early intervention and research prioritisation in anxiety, depression and psychosis
Andrea Cipriani, Soraya Seedat, Lea Milligan, Georgia Salanti, Malcolm Macleod, Janna Hastings, James Thomas, Susan Michie, Toshi A. Furukawa, David Gilbert, and 24 more authors
BMJ Ment Health, Jun 2023
Publisher: Royal College of Psychiatrists Section: Perspective
In anxiety, depression and psychosis, there has been frustratingly slow progress in developing novel therapies that make a substantial difference in practice, as well as in predicting which treatments will work for whom and in what contexts. To intervene early in the process and deliver optimal care to patients, we need to understand the underlying mechanisms of mental health conditions, develop safe and effective interventions that target these mechanisms, and improve our capabilities in timely diagnosis and reliable prediction of symptom trajectories. Better synthesis of existing evidence is one way to reduce waste and improve efficiency in research towards these ends. Living systematic reviews produce rigorous, up-to-date and informative evidence summaries that are particularly important where research is emerging rapidly, current evidence is uncertain and new findings might change policy or practice. Global Alliance for Living Evidence on aNxiety, depressiOn and pSychosis (GALENOS) aims to tackle the challenges of mental health science research by cataloguing and evaluating the full spectrum of relevant scientific research including both human and preclinical studies. GALENOS will also allow the mental health community—including patients, carers, clinicians, researchers and funders—to better identify the research questions that most urgently need to be answered. By creating open-access datasets and outputs in a state-of-the-art online resource, GALENOS will help identify promising signals early in the research process. This will accelerate translation from discovery science into effective new interventions for anxiety, depression and psychosis, ready to be translated in clinical practice across the world.