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Institutions, Companies Form Psychiatric Trial Database

Illustration of brain (NIDA)

(National Institute of Drug Abuse)

An international academic-industry collaboration brings together data on 23,401 anonymous patients from 67 trials on 11 compounds in over 25 countries, to form the largest database of clinical trial data ever created in psychiatric research. The project known as NEWMEDS — Novel Methods leading to NeW MEdications in Depression and Schizophrenia — is led by Tine Bryan Stensbøl of the Danish pharmaceutical company H. Lundbeck A/S and psychiatry professor Shitij Kapur at King’s College London in the U.K.

Despite advances in biomedical knowledge, the rate of development of new drugs has been slow, particularly in psychiatric disorders. Barriers include competition between rival companies and the limited exchange of science across the industry-academic divide.

NEWMEDS aims to overcome three bottlenecks in drug discovery for schizophrenia and depression: lack of accurate animal models, lack of tools and tests in healthy volunteers that can provide early indication of efficacy, and reliance on a clinical trial methodology that has remained unchanged for 50 years.

To identify ways to improve clinical trials, the companies shared data to devise new methods predicting treatments likely to work for individual patients, rather than using the traditional trial-and-error system. On depression, for example, NEWMEDS aims to determine why patients respond to antidepressants differently, and has combined data on genetics and clinical response in over 1,800 patients.

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