New Frontiers Meeting

Exploring how circuit-based understandings of psychiatric illness are challenging traditional diagnostic classification and therapeutic specificity

With the development of brain science, modulating neural circuits is increasingly being considered as a treatment for mental and neurological disorders. Brain function can be precisely alleviated or reversed using opto- and chemo-genetic techniques in animals and invasive and non-invasive neuromodulation in humans. Neuromodulation can potentiate behavioural and cognitive interventions and lead to durable neuroplastic changes. Furthermore, recent studies have provided novel insights into the precise regulation of the neural circuit functions by small molecular compounds targeting the enriched molecules or receptors of these neural circuits.

The ECNP New Frontiers Meeting 2025 will focus on the potential for targeting neurocircuitry in mental disorders, and explore how a circuit-based understanding of psychiatric illness is challenging the traditional diagnostic classification and thus the notion of therapeutic specificity. During the meeting, we will be discussing the role and biological understanding of neurocircuits in mental disorders, emerging technologies in the field to target neurocircuits, and the translation of new knowledge on neurocircuits into therapeutic opportunities for patients.

Neuroscience is facing a crisis in the translation of fundamental advances into new treatments. The crisis has seen a significant slowing-down in the development of new and better therapies, and widespread disinvestment from the field, especially in Europe. The ECNP New Frontiers Meeting was launched to help tackle this critical challenge. As Europe’s leading independent scientific association for the science and treatment of disorders of the brain, ECNP is in a unique position to provide a neutral, precompetitive platform for the exchange of insights and ideas across the spectrum of CNS research and development.

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