Of mice, molecules and mental health: establishment of the consortium for preclinical psychiatric research to find solutions to the translational gap

The Consortium for Preclinical Psychiatric Research (CPPR) recognises the current and ongoing major unmet translational needs in mental disorders and that to address this requires a collaborative multi-disciplinary approach uniting preclinical and clinical research and lived experience. Extending from schizophrenia to all major mental disorders the idea contained within Nani et al. (2025) [1] highlighting the value in integrating and synthesizing information from diverse preclinical models, we propose that building data infrastructure integrating both preclinical and clinical data sets will accelerate understanding of the causal pathways leading to mental illness and identification of biomarkers and novel treatment targets. As a first step, towards this, the CPPR has created a freely available open access knowledge databank of preclinical models relevant to mental illness [2] and advocates for further development of such resources incorporating diverse data sets supported by advanced human-guided AI interrogation capabilities. The intent of the concept is to leverage the molecular basis of defined behavioural, genetic and environmental features from post-mortem human, animal and cellular models to probe analogous features in clinical populations. This mapping can identify points of molecular convergence between clinical features and preclinical models highlighting potential biological pathways to target for novel drug and biomarker development.