Open Psychiatry Project
Open science for mental health — connecting molecular data with real-world impact.
The Open Psychiatry Project is enhancing access to target prioritisation and biomarker data for mental health. We are building resources and new data access models for researchers, healthcare professionals, industry and the public.
Funded by UKRI’s Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)
What is the Open Psychiatry Project?
The Open Psychiatry Project is a £2.3M initiative building the UK’s first open, publicly accessible resource for exploring how genes, cells, and molecules influence mental health conditions.
Led by Dr Mary-Ellen Lynall at the University of Cambridge in partnership with Dr Ellen McDonagh at EMBL-EBI, the project extends the globally used Open Targets resource — a major hub for drug and target discovery — to integrate a wide range of mental-health–relevant molecular datasets.
The project also involves establishing links between existing UK mental health patient cohorts, to enable a safe, federated data analysis framework to unify these valuable resources and glean new insights into the biology of mental health using real world data. This will ultimately feed into enhancing the Open Targets resource to provide evidence of potential biomarkers, drug targets, and treatments for mental health conditions.
Our interactive website will become the hub for mental health - presenting links to these resources and clear, accessible information designed for everyone: researchers advancing the science, health professionals seeking new insights, industry partners identifying opportunities, and people with direct lived experience of mental illness
Our goal is to speed up the discovery of better, more personalised treatments for mental health conditions.
Mental health biomarker data is currently fragmented across many resources and secure environments, making it difficult to assess how genes and molecules affect mental health. This project changes that.
How it works
Open molecular data
The resource brings together diverse datasets on how genes, cells, and molecules impact mental health conditions. Researchers will be able to explore biomarkers, drug targets, and potential treatments through a single, open interface.
Privacy-preserving data federation
Using cutting-edge federated technology (in partnership with Bitfount), researchers can analyse data held across multiple secure UK environments without ever moving or centralising sensitive health or genetic information. Privacy is preserved by design.
Co-designed with lived experience
People with lived experience of mental illness are central to the project — co-developing the website's design and content, and providing feedback on the other resources. A dedicated accessible interface will ensure the project outputs are genuinely useful for non-specialist users, not just scientists.
Our Partners
Built for everyone
Whether you approach mental health from the bench, the clinic, industry, or your own lived experience — this resource hub will be built for you.
Researchers
Access curated molecular datasets, explore drug targets, and build on existing biomarker evidence to advance mental health science.
Health Professionals
Discover emerging evidence on genetic and molecular factors that may inform clinical decision-making and patient care.
Industry Partners
Identify validated drug targets and biomarkers to support R&D pipelines in mental health therapeutics and diagnostics.
People with Lived Experience
Access plain-language summaries of the science and help shape how the resource evolves to meet your needs.
What you’d be part of
We have divided the main tasks into 3 different projects, running across the life of the award.
Conversations with science
Helping AI to unlock the biology of mental health for public understanding.
You will help us decide what people actually want to ask about the biology of mental health, test early AI prototypes, and define what a “good, trustworthy, and understandable answer” looks like.
Clues in the records
Deciding what matters most in hospital & GP data.
You will review types of real-world health data (from prescription histories to hospital admissions) and help prioritize which specific measures are meaningful enough to invest time in unlocking.
The Co-Pilot Study
Leading a team-based mental health analysis, with questions driven by lived experience.
You will join a collaborative team to pitch research ideas, design a custom study protocol, and test run the secure analysis on the resource.
Each project is described in full — aims, why it matters, and what taking part involves — on the FAQs page.
Help shape this
We would love for you to get involved
We are building this resource for and with the people who will use it. Whether you are a researcher, health professional, industry partner, or someone with lived experience of mental health conditions, we want to hear from you. Register your interest below and we will be in touch.
Opens the University of Cambridge’s secure form · about 5 minutes
- 01 Your name, email and where you are
- 02 A little about you
- 03 Why you want to contribute — three short questions
- 04 Which workstream interests you
- 05 Allow us to collect your data and contact you