The Yale Stress Center has been awarded a contract of up to $10.3 million over two years as part of the Evidence-Based Validation & Innovation for Rapid Therapeutics in Behavioral Health (EVIDENT) initiative from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
The contract aims to develop novel artificial intelligence (AI)-based early detection models and individual risk signatures for stress-related behavioral health illnesses before they occur or recur, and to identify biomarkers of pregnenolone treatment response in individuals with alcohol use disorder.
As part of the award, the Yale Stress Center team, led by Rajita Sinha, PhD, Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and professor in the Child Study Center and of neuroscience, and Verica Milivojevic, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry, will collaborate with Leandros Tassiulas, PhD, and Rex Ying, PhD, of Yale School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to develop and test new AI-based individual signatures of stress-related risk for chronic behavioral health illnesses.
Additional faculty members involved in the effort are Dongju Seo, PhD; Zachary Harvanek, MD, PhD; Ke Xu, MD, PhD; Nia Fogelman, PhD; and Stephanie Wemm, PhD.
ARPA-H is an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the EVIDENT program will collectively fund up to $139.4 million for novel innovations in detection and therapeutics for behavioral health.
“We are thrilled to be part of ARPA-H’s EVIDENT initiative, and it is an honor to be part of developing novel ways to prevent and treat behavioral health illnesses,” Sinha says.
The investigators’ goal is to train AI models to detect stress health symptoms using data from smartphones and other wearables, including stress hormones, sleep, mobility, and EEG brain signals linked to stress and trauma experiences in experimental and real-world settings. The project will also study pregnenolone, a rapid-acting natural and endogenous neuroplastogen.
“This unique EVIDENT award will help us identify how pregnenolone may be of benefit in treating alcohol use disorder using brain and other physiologic and hormonal objective biomarkers obtained with wearables.” Milivojevic says.
“We believe these new approaches being developed could lead to personalized proactive behavioral healthcare that emphasizes both prevention and early treatment of behavioral health illnesses,” says Sinha.
Source: Yale School of Medicine
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