Friday, March 07, 2014

Pharma pipeline for schizophrenia

I've been told in an email that these are the pharma pipleine presentations at the 4th Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference in Florence in April this year. (I've added some links):-

Targacept

Dr. David Hosford – Targacept Pharma Pipeline
La Roche
Dr. Dragana Bugarski-Kirola - Efficacy and Safety of Adjunctive Bitopertin versus Placebo in Subjects with Persistent Predominant Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia Treated with Antipsychotics – update from the SearchLyte Programme (see media release)
Omeros 
Dr. Yu - Early Clinical Results of the Phospodiesterase 10 Inhibitor OMS643762 in Development for the Treatment of Schizophrenia and Huntington’s Disease
Dr. Jonathan Rabinowitz
Randomized, Double-Blind, Active-Controlled, Phase 2/3 Study to Determine the Short-Term (6-Week) and Long-Term (6 Month) Cognitive and Anti-Psychotic Efficacy, Safety and Tolerability of CYP-1020 Compared to Risperidone
Ragy Girgis
Dopamine-1 Receptor Stimulation in Schizophrenia: a Randomized, Clinical Trial
Intracellular Therapies
Kimberly Vanover, ITI-007 a New Approach to the Treatment of Schizophrenia

Hey, I thought the pipeline was supposed to have dried up (see previous post)! Even NIMH admits "treatment development" has been slow (see recent Director's blog by Thomas Insel), although its solution with so-called experimental medicine seems biased towards neural pathways rather than psychosocial treatments (which apparently need to demonstrate their worth through phoney neural pathways). Seems as though I was wrong (although I was just being hopeful!) about abandoning diagnostic crieria for research with RDoC (see previous post).


The reason for these changes according to Insel is that "The pharmaceutical industry pipeline for medications is depleted, after several decades of 'me too' drugs" made by competing companies. He goes on, "Industry has reduced investments in medications for mental disorders and payers are raising questions about the quality of evidence for psychosocial treatments." As proposed by Marcia Angell (see my book review), what's really needed is (1) license approval only to be given to genuinely innovative drugs, rather than as at present to me-too drugs (2) an "Institute for Prescription Drug Trials" within the National Institutes of Health to take over from drug companies, who should no longer be permitted to control clinical testing of their own drugs.

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