Dr Laurent Groc, member of the Executive Committee at the VBHI Institute and affiliated with the “VBHI – Interdisciplinary Catalyser” flagship programme, Director of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Neuroscience (IINS), and Research Director at UMR 5297 – CNRS/University of Bordeaux, has been named the top laureate of the 2026 Precision Mind Award for his research project AUTOSCREEN – “When the Immune System Attacks the Brain: Detecting Autoimmune Psychoses.”
A Promising Project…
Co-led with Belinda Lennox and Adam Al-Diwani (University of Oxford, UK), Laurent Groc’s project aims to identify characteristic biological signatures in patients whose psychosis has an immune origin, in order to offer targeted immunological therapies alongside standard psychiatric medications.
The project explores a promising avenue: what if certain forms of psychosis that appear suddenly (resistant to conventional treatments, with atypical symptoms) are caused by immune system dysfunction? In some cases, the body may produce autoantibodies that mistakenly attack brain cells, disrupting their function and triggering autoimmune psychoses.
…and a Collaborative Effort between France and the UK
To achieve this, human neurons are cultured in laboratories in the UK from stem cells, allowing researchers to observe directly whether antibodies present in patients’ blood attack brain cells.
In Bordeaux, “super-resolution” microscopy will then be used to detect and study autoantibodies at the nanometre scale, offering an unprecedented view of the biological mechanisms involved.
The Precision Mind Award
Mental health disorders affect more than one billion people worldwide according to the WHO and rank among the leading causes of disability. In the absence of objective and quantifiable biomarkers, diagnosing these conditions is slow, and treatments are often insufficiently tailored or personalised.
To accelerate the transformation of mental health care, the Precision Mind Award was launched in November 2025.
Supported by Wakam, the UK NIHR Mental Health Translational Research Network, and the FondaMental Foundation, the Precision Mind Award celebrates and rewards collaborative research projects between France and the UK focused on the identification and validation of biomarkers associated with mental health disorders.
Source:
OC
