Accelerating Bipolar Disorder Research to Transform Diagnosis and Treatments with Cara Altimus and Emily Baxi BD2

Cara Altimus, the CEO of BD², and Emily Baxi, the Program Director of BD²'s Integrated Network, are focused on integrating research and clinical care to improve outcomes for people with bipolar disorder. They emphasize the gaps in diagnostics and effective treatments and the need to collect comprehensive biological and clinical data to enable a precision medicine approach. Their Integrated Network is a longitudinal, large-scale study that complements their investments in new therapeutics, moving away from a trial-and-error approach to effective interventions for individuals.

Cara explains, "When we think about the mission of BD², it's that we're bringing innovators and patients and the world together to drive new discovery, new understanding, and improved outcomes for people with bipolar disorder so that all people with bipolar disorder can thrive. And that thrive piece is critical to what we do. We're not just thinking about how we will change symptom outcomes, but we are thinking about how we engage across the whole life and all of the components of life, with science at the forefront of what we do."

Emily elaborates, "I think it's important to acknowledge here that the tools and the technologies that we have today are quite different from even those that we had 20, 15 years ago, and they've really set the stage for how we can bring research and clinical care together. So we didn't have electronic health records in the past. We didn't have the ability to understand both from a phenotype level, meaning, can we understand the biology? Can we understand the clinical trajectory, the course of somebody's illness?"

"We just didn't have the same tools to really bring clarity and understanding to that. So one of the reasons we're so excited about the Integrated Network is that it represents a framework where we're bringing those components together so that research and clinical care are really sitting side by side. So, in practice, that looks like a longitudinal cohort study."

#BipolarDiscoveries #BipolarDisorder #MentalHealthResearch #PrecisionPsychiatry #LearningHealthSystem #IntegratedCare #Psychiatry #HealthcareInnovation #ClinicalResearch #DataDrivenCare #PopulationHealth

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