ACES Winner: Psynova Neurotech delivers the first blood test for the objective diagnosis of schizophrenia

There are currently very few objective methods for diagnosing mental illness, with most diagnoses hanging on an assessment of symptoms as described by patients themselves. Now blood tests, developed by Psynova Neurotech of Cambridge, promise to make diagnosis easier and treatment more effective. This is the long-held ambition of the company’s co-founder Sabine Bahn, who has personal experience of the unmet need in this area, having watched her father suffer from bipolar disorder.

In January Psynova together with its partner, Rules Based Medicine (RBM) of Austin, Texas, launched the first and so far the only blood test that can aid psychiatrists in the diagnosis of recent-onset schizophrenia. The automated test, VeriPsych, identifies 51 blood biomarkers that Psynova has found to be associated with schizophrenia and which distinguish it from other mental illnesses that may exhibit similar symptoms.

Each year, as many as two million new patients in the EU and 1.3 million in the US show early signs of psychosis. Most of these do not have schizophrenia, but the subjective nature of the evaluation makes it time-consuming and expensive to distinguish patients who do, from those who do not.

Drug treatment clinics in the US are starting to use VeriPsych to rule out a diagnosis of schizophrenia in patients with drug-induced psychosis. “The test helps to triage patients, flagging up the most vulnerable,” says Bahn, who received the 2011 Science|Business Academic Enterprise award in Life Sciences for her drive to commercialise a new approach to diagnosing mental illness. Alongside her duties as chief scientist at Psynova, Bahn, a psychiatrist by training, manages an academic lab of 30 scientists at Cambridge University and runs a psychiatric clinic at a local hospital.

The launch of VeriPsych demonstrates impressive progress in bringing Bahn’s research to market, coming less than five years after Psynova secured its first funding from Porton Capital and Cambridge Enterprise Seed funds, in 2006. At that time Porton made a commitment to invest £2 million in stages, while Cambridge Enterprise put in an initial £50,000, with an option to follow-up with a further £200,000 against certain milestones.

Defining biomarkers

A key commercial breakthrough came in June 2008, when Psynova sealed its partnership with RBM for the co-development of VeriPsych. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but included RBM taking an equity stake. In October 2009 Psynova succeeded in defining the precise biomarkers to be used in the VeriPsych test, triggering an additional investment by RMB, and giving the US company majority control of Psynova. As that point, Porton Capital exited, having realised a return of 2.5 times its investment.

Psynova works with academic partners at the Cambridge Centre for Neuropsychiatric research and the Institute of Biotechnology at Cambridge University, to comb brain and tissue samples for the genetic, metabolic and proteomic biomarkers that are characteristic of particular mental illnesses. It is currently working on diagnostics to distinguish between unipolar and bipolar disease.

By allowing psychiatrists to make a diagnosis at a molecular level, such biomarkers should improve treatment with currently available drugs. Generally, only a minority of patients respond to a particular drug; Psynova’s tests for schizophrenia and other disorders offer the prospect of more accurate prescribing, reducing the cost of inappropriate treatment and leading to better patient care.

As one example, Bahn notes that the rate at which anti-psychotic drugs are metabolised varies widely from patient to patient. Those that metabolise a drug slowly will be sick on the smallest dose, whilst those that metabolise it quickly will experience little or no effect. “If a patient isn’t going to respond, you don’t have to wait for the clinical readout, you can adjust treatment based on the biochemical readout,” Bahn says.

Discovering new drugs

Psynova also has ambitions to use its biomarkers as the basis for discovering new anti-psychotic drugs, and has established a collaboration with a Spanish company to screen for compounds that interact with Psynova’s biomarkers.

In future, these biomarkers could also help in the clinical development of drugs for treating depression, where one of the main difficulties is the inability to correctly identify the patients for whom a specific treatment will work. The problem of getting positive results in clinical trials in depression has been a major factor leading pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, to distance themselves from the field.

Psynova has a collaboration with Roche, in which the Swiss pharmaceutical company is using Psynova’s schizophrenia biomarkers to find a molecular signature of disease progression, and predict and/or monitor the efficacy and safety of a Roche drug. The aim is to develop a companion diagnostic that would identify patients who will respond to the drug in advance of treatment.

Another important collaboration for Psynova is Newmeds, an industry-academic project to develop new animal models for testing drugs for schizophrenia and depression. Whilst it is possible to mimic human forms of heart disease or cancer in animals, the current subjective nature of mental illness diagnosis makes it difficult to establish animal models of depression. “While you can’t have behavioural models, it should be possible to develop molecular models in animals, based on our biomarkers,” Bahn says. Newmeds is part of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a €2 billion public-private partnership funded by the EU and the European pharmaceutical industry.

Since Bahn and co-founder Chris Lowe set up Psynova in 2005, the company has made remarkable headway, in research, in capital-raising, in collaborations, and in having commercialised its first product. The ACES award brings attention to an area where there is great unmet medical need, and will help Psynova make new advances, Bahn said. It also will raise the overall standard of neuropsychiatric research, she added. “People now feel this is an important area.”