Kapoose Creek Bio Corp. has announced the identification and advancement of two lead compounds with potential in neurology, specifically for indications in neurodegeneration and mental health. The compounds, KCB-100 and KCB-200, have shown potent neuroplastic and neuroprotective activity in gold-standard tests of primary neurons.
Tetra Pharm Technologies ApS and Kvanctify ApS have entered into a strategic partnership to accelerate the identification and development of novel drug candidates targeting the endocannabinoid system.
Scientists from the PsychENCODE Consortium have analyzed the brain transcriptome in a coordinated series of studies to map all the cell types, genes, epigenetic factors, and molecular pathways involved in different psychiatric disorders. After a first set of projects based on bulk analysis, the second phase of this project included 14 simultaneous publications that revealed the cellular atlas of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), among others.
The use of psychedelics is seeing impressive results in treating psychiatric disorders like treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and Mindbio Therapeutics Ltd. is expanding the field to include microdoses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to treat depression and premenstrual syndrome.
Jiangsu Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group Co. Ltd. and Shanghai Hansoh Biomedical Co. Ltd. have described potassium voltage-gated channel subfamily KQT member 2/3 (KCNQ2/3) activators potentially useful for the treatment of epilepsy and depression.
Finding an effective medication for patients with major depressive disorder is notoriously difficult, with 70% of patients failing to respond to the first drug prescribed and 30% not responding to the first four medications. Complicating matters, genetic mutations can increase psychotropic drug-related adverse events, including hospitalizations. A recent study indicates Myriad Genetics Inc.’s Genesight test can help minimize the risk of these negative events, with a reduction of nearly 40% in psychiatric-related hospitalizations and prescription of medications with significant gene-drug interactions.
Addex Therapeutics has offloaded its portfolio of preclinical allosteric modulation drugs into Neurosterix, a new company that arrives on the scene with a $63 million series A round.
The U.S. FDA granted Neuronetics Inc. clearance for use of its Neurostar advanced therapy as an adjunctive treatment of major depressive disorder in patients aged 15 to 21, making it the first transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment (TMS) cleared for this age group, the company said.
Precision psychiatry got some love at two quite different meetings this week, the European Congress of Neuropsychopharmacology’s New Frontiers meeting and BioEurope Spring. The New Frontiers Meeting, an annual two-day meeting dedicated to cutting-edge issues in brain disease research, focused on big-picture and scientific – at times almost philosophical – questions of how to get to a classification scheme for brain disorders that aligns with the underlying biology.
To Steve Hyman, the manual that clinicians currently use to diagnose mental disorders is an active obstacle to getting a scientific understanding of those disorders. Hyman, who is director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, MIT and Harvard, and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), listed multiple weaknesses of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), whose diagnoses, he said, are “arbitrary, rigid, life-stage and context-insensitive,” as well as blind to the fact that mental disorders exist along a continuum.
