Galenea and collaborator Kevin Spencer of the VA Boston Healthcare System and Harvard Medical School have won a five year $3m grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
The grant is intended for the development of biomarkers based on brain wave oscillations in animal models of psychosis and in human schizophrenia patients leveraging Galenea's in vivo electroencephalography (EEG) technology.
Galenea president and CEO Mark Benjamin said that it has become increasingly apparent that the rodent behavioral models used in industry to discover drug candidates for neuropsychiatric disorders are very poor predictors of a drug's efficacy in humans.
"The deficiencies of these models are partially responsible for the dearth of novel drugs for neuropsychiatry, and the field desperately needs models which will more accurately predict human clinical outcome," Benjamin added.
Galenea is developing EEG-based markers by examining EEG patterns in normal rodents and in rodent models of human psychosis and monitoring the changes in response to well characterized cognitive and sensory challenges. At the same time, Dr. Spencer's lab will focus on identifying similar EEG changes in healthy human volunteers and schizophrenia patients.
Galenea CNS research vice president David Gerber said that the profound gap between rodent and human behavioral responses is a key challenge in creating effective animal models.
"But evidence suggests that underlying brain network activity is far better conserved than behavior between species, particularly in response to specific cognitive tasks" Gerber added.
