New UK Consortium for Preclinical Psychiatric Research to build on collaborations formed at BNA2025
The British Neuroscience Association is pleased to highlight the early development of a UK Consortium for Preclinical Psychiatric Research, an initiative sparked by discussions at BNA2025 in Liverpool - our flagship biennial neuroscience festival.
One of the defining strengths of BNA meetings is their ability to bring researchers together across disciplines, institutions and career stages, creating space for new collaborations to take shape. This proposed consortium is a powerful example of that impact in action.
From BNA2025 to a national collaboration
At BNA2025, Dr Rachel Hill (Monash University) introduced delegates to the Consortium for Preclinical Psychiatric Research (CPPR), an Australian initiative established to improve biological understanding of mental illness and accelerate the discovery of new treatments by strengthening collaboration between preclinical and clinical researchers.
Inspired by discussions at the meeting, UK-based researchers recognised the potential value of developing a similar collaborative structure within the UK research landscape.
Learning from the Australian CPPR model
The Australian CPPR currently brings together over 60 research groups from 14 institutions. Its initial focus has been to coordinate the generation of large-scale molecular datasets using omics technologies across diverse preclinical models, enabling deeper insights into biological causality and the development of more robust, empirically tested models for diagnosis, stratification and treatment discovery.
The consortium has also supported the creation of shared data and tissue resources and has been successful in securing significant funding - including support from Wellcome - to develop multiomics pipelines and libraries of animal models.
Further details of the Australian CPPR can be found via its DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25114685.v3, and in an accompanying commentary published in Molecular Psychiatry.
A UK consortium: aims and next steps
The proposed UK consortium would aim to establish a shared knowledge and data bank, drawing together current and archived datasets and tissue collections from:
- animal and cellular models relevant to psychiatric disorders
- clinical biospecimens and imaging data
- post-mortem tissue datasets
By facilitating data sharing and coordination across research groups, the consortium would seek to:
- reduce unnecessary duplication of datasets
- enable identification of complementary and overlapping resources
- support more integrated, collaborative research programmes
The intention is to co-develop the consortium’s mission, aims and objectives by July 2026, with a view to presenting the initiative at the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP) meeting in Birmingham on 19 July 2026.
Expressions of interest invited
BNA Member, Dr Reinmar Hager (University of Manchester) is facilitating the establishment of the UK consortium and is now inviting expressions of interest from the research community.
Researchers working in preclinical psychiatric research - or related areas - who are interested in contributing to or shaping this initiative are warmly encouraged to get in touch.
Contact: [email protected], or if you are a BNA Member - via the BNA Member Directory
This initiative underlines the value of BNA meetings as spaces where ideas evolve into action, and where conversations can grow into collaborative structures with the potential for lasting impact.
