World Schizophrenia Day: How the Virtual Brain Twin project aims to optimise treatment for schizophrenia

Principal barriers to progress include current treatment options’ incapacity to predict individual responses to antipsychotics and lack of understanding of the interdependence of their various mechanisms of action.  

Furthermore, psychotic disorders, with schizophrenia as one of their severest forms, are considerably heterogeneous, which has hampered the development and clinical implementation of biomarkers for an early, personalised and more effective management of these conditions. Currently, only fluid biomarkers are available to assess and modulate exposure to antipsychotics. Therefore, the immediate challenge is to model antipsychotic drug activity in the brains of individual patients for optimising personalised therapies. 

The “Virtual Brain Twin for Personalised Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders” project aims to generate virtual brain twins for schizophrenia patients through an ecosystem that utilises neuronal microcircuit simulation, mathematical analysis, AI tools, and insights from psychiatric care and clinical studies. This innovative approach will simulate the causal chain from the antipsychotic drug molecule to its effect in the nervous system and will provide the clinicians with a multiscale brain modeling platform to optimise the drug treatment for each individual patient.