Mental health startup Cerebral teams with Alto Neuroscience to bring 'precision psychiatry' to patients' homes

Mental health startup Cerebral has inked a partnership with Alto Neuroscience to bring clinical trials for depression to patients’ homes.

Through the collaboration, Cerebral is able to offer its network of members the opportunity to participate in at-home clinical research utilizing Alto’s biomarker platform and targeted drug candidates. The companies aim to conduct clinical trials of new drugs that can better match treatments with a person’s condition, an approach they called “precision psychiatry,” so patients feel better faster.

Cerebral and Alto plan to begin enrolling 200 patients in January.

It marks the first-ever clinical trial for depression that participants will participate in fully from home, eliminating barriers to access to mental health care that have plagued the U.S. healthcare system, especially during the pandemic. The trial will test the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company's depression drug candidate, ALTO-300.

It comes at a time when more than 50 million people in the U.S. are living with a mental illness, including major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and there is an urgent need to improve personalized care for these conditions. Stark evidence of this urgency is the continued rise of suicide rates in the U.S. over the last 20 years, especially among those aged 15-24, the companies said.