Here we discuss challenges and opportunities highlighted by recent successes in drug development in schizophrenia, particularly the benefits of patient stratification to define patient subgroups most likely to respond to treatment.

Dr Paula Moran, Dr Kiri Granger, Dr J Mark Treherne, and Dr Jenny Barnett explore the effects of long Covid-19 symptoms and what the opportunities are for drug developers working to treat post-Covid-19 cognitive impairment.

This review aims to give an overview of the different types of functional assessments commonly used in clinical trials and research involving patients with schizophrenia and highlight pertinent challenges surrounding the use of these as reliable, sensitive, and specific assessments in intervention trials.

Here we investigate the relative effects of cannabis use, schizotypy status, and self-reported aberrant salience experiences on salience processing, measured using a latent inhibition (LI) task (Granger et al., 2016), in a non-clinical population.

Here we investigated the relationship between selective attention and schizotypy, by comparing participants’ performance in two models: overshadowing and latent inhibition.

Here two within-participant experiments are reported that explore the relationship between schizotypy and latent inhibition without the confound of alternative learning phenomena.

Anxiety and depression are leading causes of disability worldwide, yet individuals are often unable to access appropriate treatment. There is a need to develop effective interventions that can be delivered remotely. Previous research has suggested that emotional processing biases are a potential target for intervention, and these may be altered through brief training programs.

We identified 31 meta-analyses that examined performance across relevant tasks among 30 different clinical populations. The results suggest that social cognitive deficits appear to be a core cognitive phenotype of many clinical conditions.

Major depressive disorder affects hundreds of millions of people, is among the leading causes of disability worldwide. While a range of effective drugs are available, the majority of patients do not achieve symptomatic remission. Precision psychiatry offers a range of exciting possibilities for optimizing effective prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

The origins and rationale of the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) as a cross-species translational instrument suitable for use in human neuropsychopharmacological studies are reviewed.

Cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia is an important target for novel therapies. Computerised cognitive assessment may optimise the statistical power of cognitive trials by reducing measurement error and between-site variability and decreasing patient attrition through increased tolerability.

The Use of Cognitive Screening in Pharmacotherapy Trials for Cognitive Impairment Associated With Schizophrenia

Here, two complementary experimental studies suggest latent inhibition is modified by manipulations that are relevant to the detection and treatment of schizophrenia. These results suggest that this latent inhibition task merits further investigation in the context of neurobiological sub-groups suitable for novel treatment strategies.

Here we discuss the use of postoperative cognitive decline (POCD), which is hypothesised to have a neuroinflammatory basis, as an acute indication to demonstrate the efficacy of novel neuroinflammatory drugs.

Here we provide a brief review of the history behind latent inhibition and the limitations of existing human paradigms, before discussing a more recent latent inhibition task modification and its potential as a biomarker for schizophrenia.

Will an expansion in the use of effective digital biomarkers help improve the productivity of drug development in neuroscience? Ask Dr J. Mark Treherne, Dr Jenny Barnett and Dr Paula Moran.