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Collaboration and Open Science

The Centre for Precision Psychiatry – Quebec is facilitating the psychiatry of tomorrow

SOURCE : Montreal General Hospital Foundation (MGHF)
January 28, 2025

The Montreal General Hospital Foundation (MGHF) is pleased to support the Centre for Precision Psychiatry – Quebec (CPP-Q), whose new open-source biobank project, Solutions for Psychiatric AI Research & Knowledge (SPARK), recently shared its first data release.

Founded and led by Dr. Simon Ducharme, neuropsychiatrist and clinician-researcher at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), the CPP-Q’s mission is to improve the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders by facilitating the advancement of precision psychiatry and research.

Dr. Simon Ducharme is an Associate Investigator in the Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience (BRaIN) Program at The Institute
Dr. Simon Ducharme is an Associate Investigator in the Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience (BRaIN) Program at The Institute

To achieve this, the CPP-Q has been developing its SPARK biobank since 2022. Created with a longitudinal and “open science” approach, SPARK’s goal is to gather clinical, biological, and neuroimaging data of 1,000 participating psychiatry patients mainly from the MUHC Mental Health Mission who will be followed for 10 years. The initial data release from this unique transdiagnostic platform is now freely available to all qualified mental health researchers to further their work.

“Thanks to MGHF support, we’ve put all our resources to work to create synergies and partnerships to build this database. Now, researchers will be able to use the data to develop algorithms and predictive methods to start transforming the concept of precision psychiatry into a reality in the next few years.” – Dr. Simon Ducharme

Partnerships at the heart of SPARK biobank

While the idea is to eventually create a data collection model that could be exported to other centres, Dr. Ducharme and team are thankful to access all the necessary resources within the MUHC’s ecosystem to develop their ever-growing database.

The CPP-Q uses infrastructure at the Research Institute of the MUHC (The Institute) to process, store, and analyze data and biological samples. It also uses the Montreal General Hospital (MGH) MRI Research Platform for neuroimaging, a core service of The Institute.

“The SPARK biobank exemplifies our commitment to advancing precision health across the life course,” says Dr. Rhian Touyz, Executive Director and Chief Scientific Officer at The Institute. “By integrating cutting-edge research with collaborative innovation, our researchers are transforming the landscape of mental health care to improve the quality of life for our patients and communities.”

In addition to working at the MUHC, Dr. Ducharme is now collaborating with the Douglas Mental Health University Institute (Douglas). Support from the MGHF enabled the hiring of a project coordinator at the Douglas, thus helping to develop the CPP-Q’s partnerships with other institutions to increase the recruitment of patients whose data will be integrated into SPARK. The more data collected, the more successful the project will be.

“Our Foundation is proud to foster this collaboration, which is in line with our mission and our belief that collaboration between institutions is paramount to the success of such an initiative. To have a greater impact, our Foundation considers it essential to help Dr. Ducharme recruit patients from other institutions so that ultimately, the results can benefit more patients.” – Stephanie Riddell, President & CEO of the MGHF

As Douglas clinical psychiatrist Dr. Sherif Karama explains, partnering offers the SPARK project access to “a large pool of patients” suffering from various psychiatric disorders. “The last few decades of research have confirmed the great complexity of mental illness,” says Dr. Karama. “Combining artificial intelligence with biobank data can help refine psychiatric diagnoses by detecting subtle patterns in symptoms or biomarkers that might be overlooked by traditional approaches. This will potentially open the door to the identification of disorder subtypes, developing more precise diagnoses and, ultimately, more personalized treatments.”

The CPP-Q benefits from an expert scientific committee that includes such esteemed members as psychiatrist Dr. Howard Margolese, Director of the Program for the evaluation and prevention of psychosis and the Schizophrenia Program at the MUHC. “The ambitious and unique SPARK project will allow for collaborations between researchers to better understand trajectories of psychiatric illness over a decade of follow up,” Dr. Margolese says.

How can precision psychiatry improve patient outcomes?

As Dr. Ducharme explains, “precision medicine is the idea of adjusting treatments for a disease according to specific data we have for each person.” The CPP-Q and its biobank were born out of clinical need, he notes. While diseases such as cancer and diabetes have greatly benefited from research in precision medicine, psychiatry has not. As such, SPARK’s data could be used to develop tools for more objective diagnostic criteria, and to predict the complex combination of factors that influence disease progression and treatment response.

“In psychiatry, we use certain therapies and treatments for all patients with, for example, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Now we’re trying to increase the utility of biological data – genetics and so on – to adapt and personalize these treatments for improved patient outcomes with fewer side effects and better prognoses.” – Dr. Simon Ducharme

In addition to sharing their diagnoses, treatments, and other information, four times throughout their decade of participation, patients come in for blood work, brain imaging, and hair sampling. Combined with clinical data, interviews, and self-report questionnaires, this biological data enables the CPP-Q team to conduct very detailed biomarker analyses, including genetics and epigenetics. “We will follow the patients for a long-term period – 10 years – because we want to know what happens to these people, whether they improve or deteriorate.”

Building the psychiatry of tomorrow

Ducharme hopes the CPP-Q and its SPARK biobank will help build “the psychiatry of tomorrow,” positively impacting diagnosis, treatment, and patient care. Health technologies and artificial intelligence are creating “an era of opportunity” for research, including longitudinal projects such as SPARK. “Psychiatry is a field of infinite complexity, so it’s a good target for deep learning and artificial intelligence approaches,” he says. “Will this transform the practice or not? We’ll see, but it’s our duty to try.” As such, he emphasizes, ongoing philanthropic support is essential for the CPP-Q’s success.

“It’s a long-term, costly mission, so we need to start these projects now, then expand them. Thank you to the Montreal General Hospital Foundation for their support. Thank you for giving researchers a chance to really change the way we do things, so that in 2050, when I retire, I’ll be able to say, ‘I don’t recognize the way we treat mental illnesses, because things have changed so much, and for the better!’”

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