Enriching Antipsychotic Clinical Trials with Speech Biomarkers

In this episode of The Biological Psychiatry Podcast, Dr. Elvisha Dhamala sits down with Dr. Alex Cohen from Louisiana State University and Dr. Mark Opler from Clario to discuss their recent paper published in Biological Psychiatry.Psychiatric clinical trials have some of the highest failure rates in medicine. In this conversation, we explore how a simple, objective measure, the timing of a patient's speech, can be used to enrich clinical trial samples, nearly doubling drug-placebo effect sizes with half the sample. We discuss what speech latency reveals about schizophrenia symptoms, how this approach worked across 8 languages in a global Phase 3 trial, and what it means for the future of psychiatric drug development.Paper:A Single, Interpretable Vocal Biomarker for Enriching Antipsychotic Clinical TrialsDOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2025.11.025Follow Biological Psychiatry:Biological PsychiatryBiological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and NeuroimagingBiological Psychiatry: Global Open ScienceInstagram: @biologicalpsychLinkedIn: Biological PsychiatryBluesky: Biological PsychiatryThis podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical or professional advice. The views expressed are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect those of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, its family of journals, or its editors. © 2026 Society of Biological Psychiatry. All rights reserved, including those for text and data mining or use in AI systems.