Antipsychotic drugs do block hallucinations, but they also have scary side effects: they cause motor disorders, cognitive impairment, and the newer ones cause extreme weight gain.https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/05/25/antipsychotics-might-cause-cognitive-impairment/comment-page-1/#comment-21557 …
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Blocking D2 causes motor disorders and cognitive impairment; blocking 5HT2A causes sedation and weight gain. This new drug does neither.
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https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/45/Supplement_2/S199/5434347 … Other antipsychotics don't do anything for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (the cognitive impairment and loss of motivation.) This one does: 0.48 effect size on negative symptoms in an RCT!
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What's cool is that it was discovered phenotypically; researchers put mice in "SmartCube" boxes where their behavior was monitored on video through a variety of tests. This allows drugs to be clustered (as anxiolytics, stimulants, etc) based on their effects on behavior.
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It's a high-tech version of what psychopharmacology used to be like in the 1950's -- give some chemicals to mice and see if they act funny. This allows the discovery of totally new mechanisms of action.
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I learned about this from Emer Leahy, the founder of Psychogenics, the biotech company that built the SmartCube and pioneered this behavioral-phenotype approach to CNS drug discovery. It sounded crazy 20 years ago, but now the results are coming in and they're astonishing.
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In vivo phenotypic screening: it's how you do exploratory science when computing power is abundant! And it works! (Hint: we're doing it at Daphnia Labs too.)
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What sort of timelines are we looking at before this would be on market?
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They just came out with a phase III trial, so soon. maybe in a year or two?
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