personalized medicine: and along the hudson…

Posted on Saturday 23 April 2011

Who could forget TerryTune’s Mighty Mouse, the Superhero from the 1940s? Well he’s urgently needed in TarryTown NY to save the mice from PsychoGenics Inc.
    PsychoGenics Inc, a leader in preclinical neurobiology and in the provision of CNS drug discovery solutions, works with pharmaceutical companies and not-for-profit organizations to validate targets and select compounds to advance into clinical trials.  PsychoGenics Inc transforms drug discovery by combining expertise in behavioral neurobiology with the power of bioinformatics in conjunction with proprietary, high-throughput behavioral testing platforms that rapidly screen compound libraries for CNS activity.
PsychoGenics Inc takes things up a notch from Brain Resources in the world of personalized medicine:
    PsychoGenics supports development of the next generation of drugs to treat CNS disorders by providing a broad range of target screening, discovery and validation resources to pharmaceutical and biotech companies, academic institutions and not-for-profit research foundations. Business agreements range from consulting and designing drug discovery strategies, to fee-for-service testing, to onsite research training and management.
    The company has approximately 140 research and support staff, of which more than 35 have Ph.D.s and oversee the offered 50 validated in vivo behavioral tests. PsychoGenics is constantly updating its services by developing new behavioral models and approaches to behavioral testing.
    Services include:
      • Breeding
      • Genotyping
      • Behavioral Pharmacology
      • Phenotyping
      • Microdialysis
      • Radiotelemetry
    Customized Services: PsychoGenics has established protocols and Standard Operating Procedures for the array of pharmacologically validated tests it offers. The company is also flexible and can modify protocols and establish new tests to address client needs. Client work will not proceed until all tests pass PsychoGenics’ stringent validation requirements.
    Clients: PsychoGenics has relationships with more than 100 pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and not-for-profit institutions, including Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly & Company, Sepracor, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Lundbeck, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, the ALS Association, SMA Foundation and CHDI. Eighty five percent of the company’s current business is repeat business.
    Research Staff: The vast majority of PsychoGenics’ research staff has extensive pharmaceutical experience; thirty-five of whom have Ph.Ds. All research staff are highly trained in GLP standards and training records are available to our clients. Training is overseen by a GLP-trained Director of Quality Control and Safety. Among PsychoGenics’ areas of expertise is mouse behavior, including knowledge of the behavioral and neurological characteristics of the strains most commonly used to produce transgenic mice. Most of the tests in PsychoGenics’ recommended battery of behavioral assays have been studied in multiple strains of mice and rats.
And don’t miss the Members of the Board and the Scientific Advisors. Eric Nestler from Mount Sinai is there [formerly the Chairman from the Texas Department that brought us STAR*D and TMAP]. Maurice Fava from Harvard [and STAR*D] is on board along with Nobel Laureate, Paul Greengard. And Columbia’s walk-about Chairman, Jeffrey Lieberman, is right there as always. All you have to do is supply the compound and pay your bills. PsychoGenics Inc will figure out if has any psychopharmacologic qualities and where to use it. It looks as if they’ve really loaded the science side, including Radiotelemetry [in case their mice get lost?].

The trinity of evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and personalized medicine are coming together just in time to meet the challenges of the patent expirations over the next few years. With an empty pharmaceutical pipeline, and the age of SSRIs and Atypical Antipsychotics coming to a close, a generation of neurobiologists is aiming to consummate the marriage of academic psychiatry to the pharmaceutical industry, and continue their lucrative march into a brave new world.

Only Mighty Mouse stands in the way…
hat tip to SteveBMD
  1.  
    Tom
    April 23, 2011 | 10:17 AM
     

    When I started to read your article about PsychoGenics, I thought you were making this up as a sort of Easter present to all of us. But then I realized you were serious. But it does seem as if the Easter Bunny is alive and well on the banks of the Hudson!

  2.  
    April 23, 2011 | 2:41 PM
     

    Reality is sometimes just too much…

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