HaPpY

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We need to go far - quickly. Neuro-related disorders indeed represent a ticking threat for the European society both socially and economically, due to their enormous societal costs, which are set to grow with the aging of the European population. Among the pathologies affecting the nervous system, Mood Disorders are one of the most costly diseases. For that reason, on the last WHO World Health Day on Depression (April 7th 2017), the European Brain Council launched the Depression Challenge and called upon the European stakeholders and governments to invest the necessary resources towards reducing the rate of untreated depression to less than 10% by 2030. While depression is often multifactorial, it is noteworthy to consider that Chronic Pain is among the first determinants of mood disorders. Indeed, people with a physical illness are 3 to 6 times more likely to also face depression, leading to longer periods of illness, worse outcomes and higher economic costs. Given the importance of the comorbidity, we believe that only a research considering both groups of pathologies in an integrative way can achieve further insights into innovative treatments. However, tackling the problem of co-morbidities in neuropsychiatric conditions remains underdeveloped as researchers are unfortunately too often specialized on one domain (mood disorder and psychiatric diseases) or another (nociception and pain and neurological disorders) but rarely on both. To face the societal emergency, we propose to set up a network of institutions and companies to provide early stage researchers with a top quality international training program in neuroscience focused on those two major groups of pathologies: Mood Disorders and Chronic Pain. The HaPpY:-) network will be composed of Research Institutes with long experience and cutting edge approaches in fundamental research in either Mood Disorders or Pain and Higher Education Institutions with well-established records of excellence and educational background. Moreover, to ensure that discoveries in fundamental neuroscience can move swiftly into a clinical setting, our consortium will be enriched with Clinical Centers. Finally, researchers will be educated to ensure that their findings are translated into returns for industry and society. For that purpose, companies and other non-academic partners will also be invited to join the network. The final consortium will build a unique curriculum in a combination not found elsewhere, integrating the complementary strengths of the different partners. The international, interdisciplinary and intersectorial HaPpY:-) network will be coordinated by Dr Ipek Yalcin, senior researcher at the CNRS Institute for Cellular and Integrative Neuroscience in Strasbourg. The leadership will allow strengthening the position of INCI as one of the current main contributor in the pain research field in Europe. An urgent need for parity in research and service provision between mental and physical disorders exists and better than regarding the huge cost of the neuro-related diseases as a burden, we are determined to face this dramatic situation as a real challenge for the European Research Area. It is indeed our belief that only a coordinated program to train a new generation of researchers in a more global way considering the mechanistic synergy between Mood Disorders and Chronic Pain can succeed in our ambitious endeavor, which is to break the vicious cycle linking those two pathologies.