摘要：一项来自欧洲神经精神药理学院的最新报道称：许多身患精神疾病的人都面临一个暗淡的未来，因为制药公司停止了该领域内的一些新药研发。

摘要：一篇来自欧洲神经精神药理学会（ECNP）的最新报告称，许多身患精神疾病的人都将面临一个暗淡的未来，因为制药公司停止了该领域内的一些新药研发。

最近由于该地区的制药行业刚刚经历了大规模的重组，之前该领域一些大公司都据此做了一些相应的调整，如阿斯利康和葛兰素史克公司都在削减科研经费，并且关闭了专门研发精神疾病类药品的部门。

为此，这篇报告发出了警告：“大脑疾病新疗法的研究受到了威胁”。鉴于目前对于许多患者的治疗不足，该报告还说道：研究资金的撤回对病人及其家庭来说，意味着病人的治愈希望越来越渺茫。

伦敦帝国学院神经精神药物专家David Nutt 和英国牛津大学精神病专家Guy Goodwin撰写了此次ECNP学会的报告，该报告称：精神疾病药物的研发需要更长的时间，失败率也很高，新药研发的风险很高。荷兰莱顿大学医学中心科恩认为，出现这种现象最大的原因是神经科学本身的发展还不够，新药的研发得不到基础理论的指导。

生物探索推荐英文原文：

Psychopharmacology in crisis

Many people affected by mental illness are facing a bleak future as drug companies abandon research into the area and other funding providers fail to take up the slack, according to a new report.

Produced for the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP), the report warns that "research in new treatments for brain disorders is under threat". With current treatments inadequate for many patients, it says, "withdrawal of research resources is a withdrawal of hope for patients and their families"1.

Patients face a "withdrawal of hope" as neuropsychopharmacology funding falters.

A number of formerly big players in neuroscience have all but abandoned the area recently as the pharmaceutical industry has undergone massive restructuring. AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline have both cut research funding and closed down entire teams dedicated to developing drugs for psychiatric disorders.

Although some of the problems faced by the field also apply to other sections of the pharmaceutical industry, many are specific to researchers trying to hit targets in the brain.

David Nutt and Guy Goodwin, who authored the report following a recent ECNP meeting on the topic, note that it can take much longer to develop medicines for psychiatric disorders than for better-understood conditions such as cancer, and that potential drugs for psychiatric conditions have higher failure rates. These failures sometimes become apparent only late in the development process, making neuroscience an expensive and risky prospect for industry.

The coming crisis

Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London, told reporters at a press conference in London on 13 June that "these are dark days for brain science".

Both authors add that, in addition to the dearth of pharmaceutical funding, there is still a stigma surrounding conditions such as depression. This feeds through into the money donated to advocacy groups. "Almost nothing" comes from charity groups for mental-health research, compared with huge charity funding in areas such as cancer, notes Goodwin, head of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, UK.

He warns of a "generational crisis" in terms of both training and capacity to develop new drugs for conditions such as depression and dementia, unless the withdrawal of pharmaceutical funding is addressed.

This warning is echoed by an editorial published last week in theBritish Journal of Clinical Pharmacology (BJCP). 'Vanishing clinical psychopharmacology', written by Joop van Gerven and Adam Cohen of the Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, outlines the perilous state of the field2. Over the past year, the authors write, the BJCP has published only five papers in this area, none of which involved novel drugs.

At the 2011 meeting of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, only 13 of 300 abstracts related to psychopharmacology and, again, none related to novel drugs. This situation mirrored that at the 2010 Collegium Internationale Neuro-Psychopharmacologicum, where 8 of 870 abstracts were on human psychopharmacology and four were on "new or relatively new mechanisms of action", they report.

The road ahead

Cohen says that much of the problem derives from a failure to develop the underlying science. Depression is a complex disease, yet to assess whether drugs work, researchers have to rely on crude tools such as questionnaires.

"People have not paid enough attention to how to measure depression, how to measure psychosis," he says. "When we develop new drugs, we still measure on these basic scales."

Developing new ways of assessing brain function and disease will reduce the risks in developing new drugs, van Gerven and Cohen argue in their editorial.

Nutt and Goodwin also suggest a number of ways forward. Patents could be longer-lived for drugs that take longer to develop, such as those for brain disorders, to encourage companies to work in the area. And researchers should lobby for European funding — such as that available from the Framework programme initiative — to set brain research as a priority.

Academia could also develop more creative relationships with industry in order to fill the gap in drug development, they argue. The ECNP is pushing the idea of a 'medicines chest', to which companies can assign compounds they are no longer actively developing to be taken forward by researchers in academia or elsewhere. Nutt says that several companies have already expressed an interest in this idea.

If the current research base is allowed to evaporate, Nutt warns, it will be decades before it can be built up to start again.