- Professors Satu and Matias Palva and their research groups have received €720,000 in funding from Business Finland.
- Together with Finnish companies, they intend to investigate how to more accurately predict the effectiveness of magnetic stimulation and other depression therapies.
- The project stems from HiLIFE’s innovative brain research. The institute’s neuroscientists have contributed to the development of the Meliora game and the ambitious Wellcome Leap collaboration.
Precision therapies for mental disorders are the future of psychiatry. Among their developers are neuroscientists Satu and Matias Palva at the Helsinki Institute of Life Science HiLIFE, University of Helsinki. They are about to launch a fascinating business collaboration project aimed at developing predictive models for individual treatment responses, consequently improving the quality of life of depressed patients.
Many studies have shown that depression therapies significantly benefit roughly only one-third of patients in each therapeutic trial.
The effectiveness of depression therapies varies greatly between individuals, making it at times necessary to identify the best option through trial and error. This results in not only human suffering, but also considerable expenses. The global cost of depression and anxiety is estimated to soon rise to as much as €16 trillion per year.
“The development of new methods for targeting therapies could speed up the provision of care and also generate savings for society,” says Satu Palva.
In fact, the researcher couple, who have long worked together, have taken up the challenge with Finnish businesses. They have secured funding from Business Finland for the period 2024–2026, with which they intend to use biomarkers to improve the identification of depression subtypes. This would make it possible to establish an increasingly accurate ‘fingerprint’ for each patient’s cerebral function, using it to predict the effect of different therapies for them.
In the best case, the research will open up business opportunities for Finnish health technology companies. In fact, the project is already being monitored by MEGIN, Peili Vision, Nexstim and Sooma Medical.
“The methods under development have great commercial potential. Health technology is one of the fastest growing markets with few operators for the time being,” Satu Palva says.
The project will lay a scientific foundation for designing various AI-powered therapy recommendation systems for doctors. They could help to choose the appropriate depression therapy for each patient.
The project is coordinated by the University of Helsinki, Aalto University, Matias Palva’s other home organisation, and Tuukka Raij, Deputy Chief Physician in psychology at the HUS Group.
The provision of treatment predictions will be tested in individuals receiving medication and psychotherapy, as well as in patients receiving magnetic stimulation. The latter especially would benefit from improved predictability of effectiveness.
“That particular treatment option is recommended for people whose symptoms are not alleviated by medication,” Matias Palva explains.
The seeds of these innovations stem from the long tradition of depression research at the HiLIFE institute. In recent years, the Palvas and their colleague, Professor Eero Castrén, have been involved in the ambitious MCPsych project funded by Wellcome Leap. In it, researchers from around the world have collaboratively investigated the mechanisms of depression.
“It’s been a really awesome project,” sums up Satu Palva, who headed the efforts of the Helsinki team.
Thanks to the project, she and her colleagues have collected a great deal of valuable brain imaging data from patients with depression. Now, these data are to be exploited in the identification of different subtypes of the disease.
The search for biomarkers is also boosted by knowledge of human behaviour, which has accumulated throughout the development of the Meliora game headed by Matias Palva. Along the way, the game project took advantage of the brain imaging expertise available at the University of Helsinki. The innovative game for treating depression is currently being piloted for commercialisation in a spinoff originating at Aalto University.
“Digital therapies are rapidly becoming increasingly common, and they have excellent potential to fill gaps in the current treatment portfolio,” Matias Palva says.
Businesses can expect new ideas for treating other diseases too from the Neuroscience Center, a unit operating under the auspices of the HiLIFE institute. The institute conducts multidisciplinary preclinical studies on the mechanisms of several brain diseases.
The Palvas believe that insights that benefit both parties come about at the intersection of business life and academia.
“For instance, computational brain disease models can be of interest to both neurotechnology and healthcare companies. Integrating models into technical apps enables the provision of increasingly personalised treatment paths,” Satu Palva says.
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