On April 13, 2026 in London, the Wakam Society, the translational mental health research collaboration network of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the FondaMental Foundation have revealed the winners of the Precision Mind Prize. Launched in November 2025 as part of the Franco-British consortium on biomarker research in psychiatry, this prize rewards collaborative research projects between the two countries relating to the identification and validation of biomarkers for mental illnesses. The selection of the winners was made by an independent scientific committee. Press release.
According to the WHO, more than a billion people are affected by mental illness. Depression, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, etc.: these pathologies are among the leading causes of disability in the world and reduce life expectancy by 10 to 20 years. However, due to the lack of objective and quantifiable biomarkers – blood markers, digital markers, imaging, etc. – allowing precise identification of a disease, diagnosis is often late and treatments insufficiently personalized.
It is to accelerate this transformation that the Wakam company and the FondaMental Foundation, joined by the translational research collaboration network on mental health of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)created the Prize Precision Mind as part of this Franco-British consortium. This initiative comes in the wake of the creation of a consortium dedicated to the search for biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases (Dementia Discovery Fund) who contributed to the identification of blood markers of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Psychiatry can and must experience the same success.
Winner n°1 – Wakam endowment: AUTOSCREEN – When the immune system attacks the brain: detecting psychoses of autoimmune origin
Project leaders: Dr Adam Al-Diwani (University of Oxford, UK) & Dr Laurent Groc (CNRS / Université de Bordeaux, France)
Certain forms of psychosis appear suddenly, with atypical symptoms, and are resistant to standard treatments. The AUTOSCREEN project explores a promising hypothesis: what if these psychoses were caused by a disruption of the immune system? In some cases, the body produces autoantibodies which mistakenly attack brain cellsdisrupting its functioning and leading to the appearance of psychoses auto-immunes.
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In the United Kingdom: human neurons grown in the laboratory from stem cells to directly observe whether antibodies present in patients’ blood attack brain cells.
In Bordeaux: “super-resolved” microscopy will make it possible to detect and study autoantibodies at the nanoscale, providing unprecedented insight into the biological mechanisms at play.
Final objective : identify biological signatures characteristic of patients whose psychosis has an immune origin, to offer them targeted immunological therapies in addition to usual psychiatric medications.
Recipient #2 – NIHR Mental Health Translational Research Collaborative Network Endowment: Immunometabolic Profile of Anhedonia – Why do some patients no longer feel any motivation or pleasure?
Project leaders: Dr Mireille Laforge (NeuroDiderot – INSERM, IHU-ICE Robert Debré- Paris, France) & Dr Fabiana Corsi-Zuelli (Université d’Oxford / UKRI-MRC, Royaume-Uni).
Depression, bipolar disorders, psychotic disorders: certain forms of these illnesses share a particularly disabling common symptom: anhedonia, which is the loss of the ability to feel pleasure or motivation. This symptom is often the most resistant to treatment and the one that most degrades patients’ quality of life. Recent research suggests that it may be linked to chronic low-grade inflammation in the bodywhich would disrupt the metabolism of immune cells.
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In the United Kingdom: in-depth biological analyzes on blood samples, with the aim of identifying molecular signatures associated with the severity of anhedonia.
In Paris: cutting-edge techniques to observe immune cells in detail and measure their bioenergetic signature, to understand how they function differently in affected patients.
The originality of the approach: be interested in anhedonia whatever the psychiatric illness from which the patient suffers. Ultimately, treatments specifically targeting this symptom, via inflammation or metabolism, could complement traditional therapeutic strategies. In collaboration with Dr Livia Carvalho
(Queen Mary, London), this project builds on the UK Mental Health Platform (MHP), a UKRI/MRC-funded national infrastructure designed to enable harmonized biological and clinical research in mental health. Funding for the endowment for the Precision Mind Prize comes from the NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research), via the NIHR Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration (MH-TRC) group. The MH-TRC.
Press release, Fondamental Foundation, April 14, 2026.
