MODEM

Depression is a common and serious mental health condition that affects millions of people worldwide. One popular theory is that depression is partly caused by low levels of a chemical called serotonin in the brain, and drugs that increase serotonin levels can help treat it. However, some studies show that these drugs might not work much better than sugar pills. Some experts think that depression is a complicated condition and other chemicals in the brain are probably involved too. MODEM has therefore been designed to further investigate what parts of the brain and what chemicals in the brain are involved in unipolar and bipolar depression. This can help diagnose people experiencing depression more accurately in the future. Moreover, this may lead to the development of new medications which ultimately treat depression more effectively than current existing drugs.

Read the full article on the serotonin debate written by dr Hannah Devlin in the Guardian here:

The great serotonin debate: do depression treatments work by boosting the happy hormone? Drugs targeting the ‘happy hormone’ are widely used for depression. But some question whether the condition is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain

Check out this opinion piece 'Burning down the house: reinventing drug discovery in psychiatry for the development of targeted therapies' by Prof. Andrew H. Miller and Dr. Charles L Raison, writing about the importance of finding signs of mental illness in the body (biomarkers) to develop better treatments.

They believe that current ways of developing medications have not been very successful because we don't fully understand the physiological processes associated with psychiatric conditions. They suggest a new way of creating medicine by looking at how mental illness affects the body and finding specific systems and receptors we can target with medications.

A closer collaboration between academia, pharmaceutical companies, and the government to these aims will likely lead to better treatments for people who suffer from mental illness.

MODEM is a collaboration study with a pharmaceutical company aiming to do just that. If you are interested and would like to hear more, get in touch with us via [email protected].

You can read the article in full here:

Burning down the house: reinventing drug discovery in psychiatry for the development of targeted therapies - Molecular Psychiatry Despite advances in neuroscience, limited progress has been made in developing new and better medications for psychiatric disorders. Available treatments in psychiatry rely on a few classes of drugs that have a broad spectrum of activity across disorders with limited understanding of mechanism of ac...

If you’re interested in participating or want to know more please drop us an email at [email protected] or call us on +447955087975. We are more than happy to answer any questions you may have so please feel free to reach out.