About the
Hub for
Metabolic Psychiatry
The Hub for Metabolic Psychiatry is one of six new research hubs forming the basis of the UKRI mental health research platform, established to accelerate progress towards novel and more effective treatments for SMI. The Hub is comprised of a network of universities with a long-standing interest in the interface between mental and physical health.
We work closely with patient and lived experience organisations, including The McPin Foundation and The James Lind Alliance, to ensure our work is grounded in patient priorities. By combining our experience, skills and expertise we aim to accelerate progress toward new and more effective treatments for serious mental illness.
Our Vision
Our vision is to achieve a step change in UK research activity and clinical innovation in Metabolic Psychiatry by achieving three core values.
Our core values are:
Driving discovery science in metabolic psychiatry.
Co-producing and testing novel metabolism-based treatment approaches with people with lived experience.
Gilding UK-wide capacity for metabolic psychiatry research and clinical innovation.
Our Workstreams
The Hub for Metabolic Psychiatry comprises six workstreams operating in concert to advance our understanding of the connection between metabolic and mental health.
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We assess bi-directional causal associations between SMI and metabolic dysfunction in large genomic datasets and seek to uncover shared genetic architecture.
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We harness advances in machine learning to analyse large health datasets and explore novel insights into metabolic phenotypes in SMI. We seek to identify individuals and groups at high-risk of cardiometabolic disease and poor clinical outcomes.
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We will identify metabolomic biomarkers of serious mental illness and conduct a deep-phenotyping 12-month prospective study to assess how changes in metabolic profile relate to clinical and functional outcomes.
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We work closely with people with lived experience to identify established and emerging interventions which target metabolic dysfunction to improve psychiatric and medical outcomes in people with serious mental illness. These patient-priorities feed into pilot studies which seek to uncover new treatment modalities for serious mental illness.
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We integrate advances in machine learning analysis across all workstreams to gain deep insight into the data. A data curation and data sharing platform will allow us to maximise the open science opportunities of this work.
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Working closely with the McPin foundation we ensure that patient priorities are at the heart of all of our research. We are committed to meaningful, impactful and measurable input from people with lived experience at every stage of the research process.
