Wellcome has awarded £5.3m in funding to digital mental health company Wysa to support a scale-up study focused on adapting a clinically validated digital intervention for adolescent girls living in rural India.

The grant will fund research aimed at addressing anxiety and depression among adolescent girls, a group that faces some of the most significant mental health inequalities globally. The project will be led by Wysa in collaboration with academic and community partners in the UK and India and will focus on adapting an evidence-based digital mental health intervention to better reflect the cultural and social realities of girls living in low-resource rural settings.

India is home to more than 253 million adolescents, making it the largest adolescent population worldwide. Mental health needs among young people remain substantial, with around half of all mental health conditions beginning before the age of 14. Suicide is among the leading causes of death for young people in the country, with adolescent girls facing heightened vulnerability due to higher rates of anxiety and depression combined with social and structural barriers.

These barriers include limited autonomy, restricted access to technology, lower literacy levels, stigma surrounding mental health and family gatekeeping, all of which can limit access to timely and effective support. The Wellcome-funded study aims to address these challenges by focusing not only on clinical effectiveness but also on real world usability and accessibility.

The research will be led by Chaitali Sinha, chief clinical and R&D officer at Wysa, who will act as principal investigator. The multidisciplinary study team includes Aparna Joshi from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Ceire Costelloe and Patrick Kierkegaard from Imperial College London, Dhirendra Pratap Singh from Milaan Foundation, and Becky Inkster from the University of Cambridge.

The study will begin by identifying cultural, contextual and systemic factors that limit adolescent girls’ ability to engage with digital mental health support in rural India. These insights will then inform the adaptation of Wysa’s existing intervention, with changes made to both content and delivery to ensure relevance to the lived experiences of girls and their communities. The adapted intervention will then be evaluated for efficacy and feasibility in real world low-to-middle-income settings.

Sinha said the funding would enable a deeper level of adaptation than simple language translation. She said: “This funding allows us to go far beyond simple translation. By working closely with academic and community partners, we aim to co-design a digital intervention that is not only clinically effective, but genuinely usable and relevant for adolescent girls living in rural India.”

Wellcome said the award reflects its broader focus on early intervention and evidence-based digital innovations in mental health. Miranda Wolpert, director of mental health at Wellcome, said: “We are delighted to support Wysa in their work to adapt and scale up this evidence-based digital intervention to address anxiety and depression in adolescent girls across rural India. This funding was awarded as part of our call to find the best ways to develop and scale digital innovations for early intervention.”

By combining clinical evaluation with delivery considerations in low-resource environments, the project aims to generate insights that could inform the development and scale-up of similar mental health interventions in other underserved populations globally. The findings are expected to contribute to the growing evidence base around digital mental health tools for adolescents and their role in addressing global mental health challenges.