Precision Mental Health: Develop Tools to Inform Treatment Selection in Depression (UG3/UH3 Clinical Trial Optional)
The "Precision Mental Health: Develop Tools to Inform Treatment Selection in Depression" grant aims to fund the development and early testing of predictive tools or biomarkers that can help determine the most effective treatment for individual patients suffering from depression.
Description
The purpose of this phased Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is to create a pipeline to accelerate the development and early validation of predictive tools and/or biomarkers to inform individual-level treatment selection among two or more existing therapeutics for depression. This phased inter-agency program will be milestone-based and provide support from multi-disciplinary teams to address scientific, technical, clinical, regulatory, and commercialization requirements. In the first phase (UG3), investigators are expected to identify potential tools and/or biomarker(s) that can predict whether a patient will differentially respond to one well-established depression treatment versus another. This could be accomplished using secondary analysis of data from completed clinical trials or using real-world clinical data, or by conducting small, efficient pilot feasibility studies to assess promising new tools or biomarkers to predict individual treatment response to a specific therapeutic for depression. In the second phase (UH3), investigators will conduct independent, prospective clinical trials to initially validate the utility of the tool/biomarker for predicting differential response to established treatments for depression. The overall goal of this NOFO is to support the testing of various tools/biomarkers as predictors of response to well-established depression treatments and halt the development of those tools that do not meet sufficient performance characteristics to justify further testing. Ultimately, tools that are successful in early-stage studies could be further evaluated for future use in decision-making in clinical practice settings.