Grant Award Summary

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded The Johns Hopkins University a $538,657 Project Grant on July 15, 2026, under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to develop and validate the Neural Navigator platform—a standardized computational tool for identifying circuit-level dysfunction signatures in patient-derived cerebral organoids. The project addresses a critical translational gap in understanding schizophrenia and bipolar disorder by leveraging multi-electrode array (MEA) recordings combined with machine learning-based modeling to quantify electrophysiological markers across diseased and control neural tissue. Preliminary data demonstrate >90% classification accuracy in differentiating disease-specific phenotypes, establishing proof-of-concept for this novel diagnostic approach in psychiatric research.

The project will deliver two primary outputs through April 30, 2031. Aim 1 will generate a longitudinal MEA dataset from 75 cerebral organoids (25 per condition) spanning developmental days 90-270, creating reproducible electrophysiological profiles that characterize circuit development and disease-associated phenotypes in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and controls. Aim 2 will establish Neural Navigator as a validated quantitative pipeline integrating stimulus-response network dynamics modeling, information flow analysis, feature selection algorithms, and interpretable classification models to create the first reproducible framework for stratifying idiopathic psychiatric disorders at the circuit level in human-derived neural tissue.