Researchers awarded two major grants totalling over £1.6 million to investigate severe mental illness
29 April 2025
Researchers from Cardiff University’s Schools of Medicine and Psychology have been granted two Wellcome Trust Mental Health and Neuroscience awards totalling over £1.5 million to investigate the underlying causes of cognitive impairments seen in severe mental illness such as schizophrenia.
Professor Anthony Isles from the Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG) has been awarded £779,000 to investigate the neurodevelopmental pathways underlying cognitive impairments and premature brain ageing seen in severe mental illness such as schizophrenia.
Professor Isles will be working as part of an international consortium on the five-year, £3.4 million project named, “The glue that holds the pieces together: unlocking cognitive health in psychotic disorders,” led by Professor Esther Walton at the University of Bath. The goal of the project is to understand the process of advanced brain ageing at a cellular level.
“We are thrilled to receive funding for this research. The project aims to understand the cellular causes of premature brain ageing to help identify effective treatments for people living with severe mental illness. It will enable us to identify effective treatments and ease cognitive impairments in psychotic illness at an early stage.”
To do this, researchers will use large-scale neuroimaging datasets, prospective proteomic samples of people who went on to develop psychosis, computationally advanced methods, and experimental mouse models for schizophrenia which are part of the MURIDAE programme led by Professor Isles at Cardiff University.
A second £870,000 grant has been awarded to Professor Krish Singh and Professor Neil Harrison from the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC) to study disorganised thought in people with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Again, both professors will be working as part of an international consortium on a five-year, £5 million project called ‘DIALOG’ and will use large language models of speech to gain new knowledge about thought disorder in individuals with severe mental illness.
This consortium is led by Professor Lena Palaniyappan at McGill University in Montreal and will provide new insight into one of the most but least well understood components of psychosis.
“Disorganised thought is a hugely important issue for people living with severe mental illness yet is poorly diagnosed and treatments are very limited. The team Lena has assembled is truly exceptional and Krish and I very much look forward to working with them to quickly improve understanding and translate this into real-world benefits for our patients.”
Researchers will use the magnetoencephalography (MEG) scans of over 600 participants recruited in a UKRI-MRC Mental Health Platform-funded project, called the Brain and Genomics Hub led by both Professor Harrison and CNGG Director, Professor James Walters.
Both projects are funded by The Wellcome Trust who support discovery research in three worldwide health challenges: mental health, infectious disease and climate and health.