Nowhere in medicine are biomarkers more urgently needed, and more difficult to obtain, than in psychiatry. One the one hand, psychiatric disorders account for a large proportion of the size and burden of disease in Europe and are leading causes of early retirement and sick days at work, pointing to a tremendous unmet medical need. On the other hand, our currently used psychiatric nosology lacks biological validity and is difficult to translate into therapeutic targets and strategies.

Consequently, a large disinvestment of pharmaceutical research and development from psychiatry has happened in the last two years, pointing to an urgent need for reconceptualizing the psychiatric translational enterprise.

In this lecture, we will introduce and review strategies for deriving and using biomarkers in psychiatric translation, using schizophrenia as an example. Our main approach will be to define, using multimodal biological techniques, mechanisms of risk for schizophrenia that can then be interfaced with drug and psychotherapy development at various levels ranging from target detection over better animal models to new approaches to early human studies and finally to personalized medicine.