After 13 years as director of the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), Thomas Insel, MD, is moving to the high-tech sector next month when he joins Google's expanding Life Sciences Division.
Insel, the longest-serving NIMH director since the agency's founder stepped down in 1964, says he was ready for a change. He considered options in academia, biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry, but it was Google's potential to make a significant impact in the mental health field that caught his attention.
"The company is interested in being truly disruptive by creating innovations that transform lives, and I realized it would be fantastic to engage in thinking with them about the very complicated problem of mental illness and brain disorders," he says. "Their M.O. is to go places where they can have a tenfold impact."
The Life Sciences Division, which Google recently spun off into a standalone company under its newly formed parent company, Alphabet, is interested in developing tools for early prediction of and interventions for disease. One of its first projects, for example, was a contact lens that allows diabetes patients to continuously monitor glucose levels.
Now, Insel will work on expanding that innovative thinking to the mental health field. He believes one clear area for improvement is shortening the duration of untreated psychosis in this country. Conditions like heart disease and cancer can already be detected early, but this is rarely the case for mental illness, Insel explains.
"To me it is extraordinary that there is on average a 74-week duration of untreated psychosis," says Insel. He'd like to see that shrink to as little as seven weeks.
Google's strength in data analytics could be leveraged to identify patterns such as changes in cognition and behavior that are difficult to detect in the early stages of psychosis, he says. In many cases, people who were eventually diagnosed with the disease went undiagnosed for years because their initial symptoms masked themselves as traditional adolescent behavior, such as isolation from others and difficulty with academics, Insel says. Smartphones, for example, could collect speech data that would be plugged into an algorithm that detects disorganized speech patterns indicative of psychosis.
He is also interested in exploring using similar methods in the early detection and prevention of suicide.
While Google may have the edge when it comes to creating algorithms to crunch data, the company will need partners who can provide the data for work like this, such as institutions that are running large studies of psychosis or suicide, Insel says.
"This is a team sport, and we need partners from the government, private sector and academia to solve some very difficult problems in mental illness," he says. "I have a pretty good feel for the research broadly because that's been my job, and now I'm looking forward to helping Google figure out how they might achieve their tenfold impact."
— Heather Stringer