New Frontiers Meeting 2025

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 focused 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.

The ECNP New Frontiers Meeting on 'Targeting neural circuits in psychiatry' was financially supported by the following companies, presented in alphabetical order: