Chemist turned neuroscientist. @MGHMartinos @MGHImaging. Editor-in-chief of @ACSChemNeurosci.
Boston, MA
Joined November 2013
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A parent, watching his son cycle through hospitalizations, incarceration, homelessness, said this to Thomas Insel MD at what was supposed to be an inspiring presentation about NIMH science. Tom told me the story himself, and how it changed him.
Has the field been shooting for the wrong endpoints, acute symptom relief instead of real recovery? The fire burns while we struggle to find out.
Full conversation at Aether in Mind aetherinmind.substack.com/p/…
"Our house is on fire, and you're talking to us about the chemistry of the paint."
An arresting line, putting the mental health treatment challenge in very direct terms.
All you drug hunters out there, are you optimistic about this?
While I absolutely agree that we can and should go faster in clinical trials, I'm not sure we can get through all three phases of development in four years.
Simulation and seamless designs can cut the dead time between trials, but they can’t speed up the biology. For slowly progressing diseases, the real gains will come from better biomarkers and endpoints that show us sooner whether a drug is working.
Have you seen this new @ARPA_H program? SURPASS: Simulation-augmented, Real-time Platform Adaptive Seamless Trials
The premise on the website is, "What if we could shorten clinical trials from taking more than a decade to less than four years?"
Can it be done?
"I think industry has basically given up on psychiatry except for appropriately exploiting serendipitous discoveries. If you were to do a clinical trial with drugs that turned out to be effective, you dont see an effect and the FDA says no dice…
They weren't outliers. They had a different disease. Psychiatry cant get there yet because it hasn't found its biomarkers.
I often think about the version of someone I knew before something shifted, and the version after.
The numbers on mental illness are staggering. One person is harder to look past. That's who I keep in mind.
If someone came to mind, maybe send them a note today.
#MIAW
"SSRIs have a really good efficacy in about twenty-four percent of patients according to the FDA. There's nothing about these drugs that suggests that we would learn anything except how to make more of those symptomatic downstream drugs." — Steve Hyman
Do you agree?
I think we can still learn a lot by studying responders and non-responders. I also think so-called outliers can unlock knowledge that Gaussian statistics never will.
I just recorded an episode of Foodie Pharmacology with @QuaveEthnobot. Real pleasure to talk with someone who takes natural compounds as seriously as I do, from a complementary angle.
Nature might be the real bridge between brain and mind, physiological effects on one side, felt experience on the other. But nature was never optimizing for us. Nature gives us brilliant pharmacology. Not ready medicines.
Listen at foodiepharmacology.podbean.c…
