“Schizophrenia symptoms are believed to be caused by miscommunication between brain areas. The miscommunication may be caused by lack of synchronization of the activity of neurons in the brain. Normalizing synchronization of neurons is expected to improve communication between brain areas and thereby threat the symptoms of schizophrenia. This is yet to be confirmed in clinical studies, but data is very robust as we have tested the approach in different DNA-mutations leading to schizophrenia and the identified treatments were able to normalize brain cell function in all of them.”
Lundbeck is also the company partnering with Vanderbilt University on their new muscarinic drug.
it may be 10 years or more before we will have approved treatments, but we are encouraged and optimistic that we may have found the basis for creating much better treatments for many patients based on affecting the underlying biological reasons for schizophrenia.
Their first one, LuAF35700 is going to finish phase 3 at the end of this year/early 2019. It is a medication for treatment refractory sz. I don’t know that it was developed with the methods they described here (AI, genetics) but as far as I can tell, they advanced it quite quickly. So it appears they know how to get s hit done.