Taliaz: Genotyping Depression With EIC Accelerator Money

Choosing an antidepressant is still largely trial and error, with response rates of 42% to 53% under current practice, according to a 2021 paper by the company's own researchers in Translational Psychiatry. Taliaz, a Tel Aviv company founded by the neuroscientist Dekel Taliaz and his brother Oren, set out to shorten that search with Predictix: a cheek swab for genetic data, a questionnaire on clinical history and background, and a machine-learning model that ranks antidepressants by predicted effect and side effects. On the European Commission's list of winners of the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, TALIAZ LTD of Tel Aviv is the only company named for the Predictix project. The EU contribution was €2,482,016.25 towards a total cost of €3,545,737.50, according to CORDIS.

Seven years later, the record splits in two. The software was built, four peer-reviewed papers appeared, and a small open-label pilot in Paris was published. The randomised trial that was supposed to show the test beats normal prescribing never reported a result. After the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, five weeks after the EU project ended, the company halted its European operations and turned its platform into a triage and follow-up system for psychiatric care in Israel, CEO Dekel Taliaz told The Jerusalem Post in March 2026.

Where Taliaz Stands Now

The company is registered as active at 3 Shaham Street in Petah Tikva, according to OpenCorporates, which draws on the Israeli Corporations Authority, and the Israel Innovation Authority lists the same number and address, 18 employees, "initial revenues" and grants from its fast-track programme in 2023 and its Horizon participation programme in 2024. Israeli private companies do not file public accounts, so revenue, losses and equity could not be checked. The English version of the authority's page calls the company Taliaz Health Ltd; the registered name is Taliaz Ltd.

The product has changed. In December 2023, as demand for psychiatric care rose after the 7 October attacks, Taliaz offered to subsidise psychiatric treatment through Healthy Mind, a network of digital mental health centres it operates, and to give them access to Predictix, ice.co.il reported. In October 2024 it signed a partnership with the Israel Trauma Coalition to keep supplying psychiatric services to resilience centres in the south; by then more than 1,800 patients had been treated in over 6,500 clinical sessions, with an average of 3.5 days to the first appointment, according to ice.co.il. In August 2025 Walla reported that the company's psychiatric service works with the Maccabi health fund, medical centres and resilience centres in the south and north. All of these figures come from the company or its partners and could not be independently checked.

What the platform does now is mostly workflow: it collects patient questionnaires, flags urgency, summarises clinical data and manages follow-up, so that psychiatrists can see more patients, Dekel Taliaz told ice.co.il in July 2025 and The Jerusalem Post in March 2026. That is why this article classes the company as pivoted: the genetic antidepressant report the EU funded is no longer its lead product, although it grew into the current one. A June 2026 paper by Dekel Taliaz in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience still gives Taliaz, Petah Tikva, as his affiliation. The company's own sites were not reachable in October 2026: taliazhealth.com returned an error page and the predictix.ai domain did not resolve.

The Technology: Ranking Antidepressants for One Patient

Standard practice is to start with a first-line antidepressant and switch if it fails or causes side effects. Predictix fed genetic, clinical and demographic features together into machine-learning models trained on patients' actual responses. In a 2021 paper in Translational Psychiatry, Taliaz researchers trained the models on the US STAR*D study and reported 72.3% balanced accuracy on a validation set and 70.1% on a held-out test set of 259 patients; on external data from a separate US citalopram study (PGRN-AMPS) the figure fell to 60.5% and 61.3%, according to the PubMed abstract. Dekel Taliaz declared stock ownership in the company in that paper.

The only published study of patients treated on Predictix's advice ran at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris from August 2020 to July 2021. It enrolled 30 adults; 20 completed it and 18 were analysed. On the primary measure, 55.6% responded; on the clinician's global rating, 72.2%. There was no control group, and the authors wrote that "larger randomized controlled trials are required" to show any benefit over standard prescribing, according to the 2026 paper in the Journal of Affective Disorders. An earlier version appeared in 2022 in Pharmacology and Pharmacogenomics, as listed on CORDIS. When the French lab group Cerba announced a partnership with Taliaz in October 2022, it quoted "a 72.2% response rate in clinical research", the secondary figure, without mentioning the size of the study, according to Cerba's release and Santé Mentale.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 19 October 2020 and the project ran from 1 September 2020 to 31 August 2023, according to CORDIS. Why Predictix started 17 months after the cut-off is not public. Taliaz announced the grant only in November 2020, as CTech reported. It had already completed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study from November 2018 to February 2019, according to CORDIS.

The project's stated objective was "optimizing and further improving the software engineering and clinical validation of the platform". The single published report, for September 2022 to August 2023, says the first iteration of the platform was complete and the second "currently underway", the multi-centre clinical study protocol was approved and "the first patients were recruited", and Taliaz was still meeting regulatory requirements to add two more centres. That study is registered as NCT05137197: a randomised, double-blind trial of 354 planned patients comparing Predictix-guided treatment with usual care at sites in Brussels, Liège, Paris and Geneva, started on 4 October 2021. Its registry entry was last updated in November 2021, and its status is now listed as unknown. No results have been published.

1. Platform softwarePartly deliveredFirst iteration built; second still underway at project end, per CORDIS.
2. Multi-centre clinical validationNot achievedRecruitment began; no results from the 354-patient trial.
3. Peer-reviewed evidenceDeliveredFour papers listed on CORDIS, including Translational Psychiatry 2021.
4. CE mark under the MDRUnverifiedListed as a CORDIS deliverable; the certificate is not public.
5. Sales in EuropeUnverifiedCerba launch promised for January 2023 never confirmed; Europe halted after October 2023.

On regulation, the record is thin. CORDIS lists a deliverable titled "CE mark approval according to the MDR 2017/745", but the document itself is not readable on the portal. The company's website stated, in an archived version from July 2025, that PREDICTIX Genetics Antidepressant and PREDICTIX Digital Antidepressant were "available for commercial use in the EU and Israel". No notified body, certificate number or risk class could be found. The project ended on schedule according to CORDIS, but without the clinical validation it was meant to deliver.

Customers: Announced, Then Quiet

Before the EU grant began, Taliaz had a UK partner. In March 2019 Psychiatry-UK, an online psychiatry service, launched Predictix nationwide as a home DNA-swab service, according to PR Newswire. In August 2019 ISRAEL21c reported that Psychiatry-UK charged $450 for the test, that Taliaz had seven employees, and that Israel's health ministry had given it $670,000 to begin a rollout with the Maccabi health fund and "pledged another $7.5 million"; whether that money was paid is not public. In October 2022 came the Cerba partnership, with the test due across Cerba's lab network in France and abroad by January 2023. No announcement that the test went on sale through Cerba could be found, and no customer in Europe has been named since.

Why It Matters for Europe

On 7 June 2023 the European Commission adopted a "comprehensive approach to mental health" with 20 flagship initiatives and €1.23 billion in EU funding, built in part on access to "high quality and affordable mental healthcare and treatment", according to the Commission's announcement and the Commission Representation in Ireland. Faster matching of patients to medication fits that aim, and the Predictix project ran its clinical work with European hospitals in Paris, Belgium and Geneva. The same April 2019 list also funded another Israeli depression project, elminda's EEG-based PREDICT. For European patients, however, the payoff of the Taliaz grant is hard to find: the randomised evidence was never published and the company withdrew its European services in October 2023.

The Verdict

Taliaz and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.