Health economic aspects of the PERsonalized MEDicine in SCHIZophrenia project
Date: 2020-2025
Funding: FWF/EC H2020 EraPerMed
Collaborator(s): Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Copenhagen University Hospital, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, UMC Groningen, University Munich
Information: Judit Simon (co-PI), Nataša Perić, Daniel Heilig
Schizophrenia is a disabling mental illness that affects millions of Europeans. While antipsychotic medications alleviate symptoms in one third of patients, one third exhibit persistent symptoms and one third do not respond at all. There is an urgent unmet need to identify reliable predictors of outcome and treatment response to guide personalized treatment. There is suggestion that levels of immune-related molecules in the blood can predict relapse and response to treatment in schizophrenia patients and that a subset of patients with pro-inflammatory signs in their blood can benefit from add-on anti-inflammatory drugs.
As part of this international collaborative project, a randomized clinical trial is conducted with an objective to assess the clinical and cost-effectiveness of algorithm-based treatment stratification for schizophrenia in several European countries. The DHE leads the health economic research component focusing on whether treatment stratification for add-on anti-inflammatory treatment is cost-effective when compared to treatment as usual within the 6 months trial period.