Where Discovery Leads 2025: Behavioral Health Lifespan Research

Tami D. Benton, MD, Psychiatrist-in-Chief:

In mental health overall, there's not as much knowledge about what drives the onset of mental health conditions for young people, and not as many effective treatments as there are in many other areas. But as we move more towards personalized medicine, and our large repositories of information about patients allows us to do that, and the fact that we're able to look at this data from pregnancy through adulthood, in collaboration with our colleagues at Penn, allows us to move closer to personalized medicine and discovery. And so I think that's one of our real strengths.

Advanced Behavioral Health, as you know, is one of our new facilities. It's a beautiful, state of the art renovation of an older building in Philadelphia. And it's part of CHOP's commitment to remain community-based in West Philadelphia, which is really wonderful. Our research is multifaceted. We're very fortunate that we have a large team of investigators who conduct, community participatory research, implementation science, clinical trials and intervention trials for psychotherapy. And then we also have a lot of basic research, focused on stem cell research to understand the etiology of brain-based disorders like schizophrenia.

And our research is lifespan based. So it starts from pregnancy through adulthood, which covers all the phases of development of young people. We're really fortunate in that we actually run a lot of, intervention trials, that inform clinical practice, particularly psychotherapy practice, which is the most common treatment that we provide at the Behavioral Health Center.

I think one of CHOP's greatest strengths is our patient population. So, you know, we're a large enterprise, with a variety of patients who come through our doors coming to seek the best patient care they can receive.
But also for some people struggling with conditions for which we have no treatments and cures, CHOP is the place that will provide that. And, you know, we're starting to do that work, in mental health as well. So we benefit from the large data bases that we have here, not just the patient facing data that we collect, but also, the biological data we collect for our, you know, for genomics, for genetics, and for other studies that we, we do here.

One of the beautiful things about CHOP's research across conditions, including the mental health conditions, is our our biobanks and the fact that we're able to have large repositories for data and information, and that we have advanced computational capacity that really allows us to use that data for discovery. And it's available to all the investigators. And that is what I think really puts us in a very unique position.