Building the Australian Psychiatric Research Knowledge Bank (APsyK Bank)

Uniting data, pre-clinical models, and researchers to understand mental disorders at the molecular level

Project timeline: December 2025 to November 2027

Background

Globally, mental disorders are among the top 10 leading causes of disease burden, with no global reduction since 1990, and limited advances in treatments for major conditions in over 70 years. Progress in understanding the biological causes of mental illness is hindered by limited access to brain tissue and a lack of empirical molecular data relevant to biological psychiatric research. Biological psychiatry relies on the development of preclinical models that attempt to replicate the features of psychiatric disorders. To identify patterns and trends across models, researchers seek to compare large datasets across multiple biomolecular data types. Therefore, standardising data types and harmonising data across models into large collaborative resources can significantly advance research in identifying causal pathways and developing improved treatment options for major mental disorders.

Image of a brain with digital connection networks

In Australia, biological psychiatry is driven by world-leading psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and molecular biologists who have recently formed the Consortium for Preclinical Psychiatric Research (CPPR). CPPR aims to provide coordination and leadership in a nation-first effort to generate standardised large-scale molecular data using omics technologies across the currently disparate preclinical model systems used to study the causes of mental illness. By harmonising these models through consistent data collection methods, the consortium seeks to improve understanding of biological causality and develop robust, empirically validated models to support drug development, diagnostics, treatment stratification, and prognostics.

This project will establish the Australian Psychiatric Research Knowledge Bank, a FAIR-aligned, metadata-rich platform that enables the secure storage, management, and discovery of psychiatric omics data generated by the CPPR.

Project objectives

The Australian Psychiatric Research Knowledge Bank Initiative will facilitate the sharing of Australia’s first large-scale, collaborative, and standardised multi-omics dataset for psychiatric research, using transcriptomics and proteomics to uncover disease pathways. By enabling the comparison of preclinical models with human brain samples, the Australian Psychiatric Research Knowledge Bank will:

  • Enable investigation of causative pathways underlying psychiatric disorders

  • Enable the identification of common biological changes or ‘signatures’ that may then be targeted therapeutically

  • Provide researchers with robust and standardise data to address the current diagnostic and treatment challenges in psychiatry

  • Strengthen global collaboration through a secure data-sharing platform of omics datasets for mental disorders across model systems

To create the Australian Psychiatric Research Knowledge Bank, the project will:

  • Deploy a Gen3 instance in AWS to create the Psychiatry Knowledge Bank which will host omics data and metadata.

  • Co-design a domain-specific data dictionary and metadata model for psychiatry, embedding FAIR principles and Persistent Identifiers (PIDs).

  • Pilot API-based metadata harvesting to Health Data Australia (HDA) to support national discoverability and catalogue synchronisation.

  • Explore secure access models aligned with the Trusted Research Environments (TRE) Framework to create an options paper.

Role of Australian BioCommons

BioCommons will lead the data commons component of work: co-designing and governing the metadata model; establishing and operating a secure, scalable Gen3-based data platform; defining a practical ingestion pathway; coordinating initial data onboarding (synthetic then real cohorts); and delivering a live demonstration to the consortium. This ensures a technically robust, FAIR-aligned and secure foundation that interoperates with national infrastructure and aligns with the GUARDIANS program, positioning the platform to scale across life-science domains.

Outcomes

  • Improved data discoverability and reuse 

  • Enhanced collaboration and efficiency for the CPPR community

  • Increased data capability using metadata standards and best practice

  • Strengthened national interoperability using shared metadata standards

  • Evidence base for future infrastructure planning. 

Future directions

  • Expansion in data types (epigenetic, metabolomics, lipidomics, immune or inflammatory phenotyping data)

  • Scaling of the platform to include all major mental disorders

  • Inclusion of a secure analytics platform to better facilitate global collaboration, and enable users to connect preclinical data with clinical mental health platforms

  • Development of an AI Data Commons to enable development of AI tools across empirical molecular data for mental disorders

Collaboration

The Australian Psychiatric Research Knowledge Bank was established through a collaboration between the Consortium for Preclinical Psychiatric Research (CPPR) and Australian research infrastructure partners Bioplatforms Australia, Phenomics Australia, ARDC and Australian BioCommons.

Project partners: