Many years ago, when I was writing on a weekly basis for New Scientist, in fact long before the magazine even had a web presence, I wrote a short news item about a new class of drugs for treating the symptoms schizophrenia.
Within days of that issue hitting the shelves I received several letters from desperate readers asking where they could get hold of the drug. Unfortunately, it was very much in the experimental stages and as far as I am aware the compound in question never did make it to market. A lesson learned.
A press release from the American Chemical Society announces yet another development in the drug discovery process for schizophrenia. At first, I was reluctant to follow it up, but even though once again the discovery is preliminary and not yet at the pharmaceutical marketing stage, it is an interesting enough lead to warrant a mention.
Indeed, scientists are reporting progress toward treating a long-neglected group of symptoms that impair the functioning of people with schizophrenia. This chronic, highly debilitating disease affects 3 million people in the United States. Schizophrenia involves “positive” symptoms (hallucinations and delusions), “negative” symptoms (apathy and withdrawal) and cognitive symptoms (such as difficulty in filtering out unimportant sensory information).
Despite major advances in drug therapy for the positive and negative symptoms, cognitive symptoms – which appear in 85 percent of patients – go largely untreated today. A team of researchers at Pfizer, including Bruce Rogers, report the discovery of a potential drug for schizophrenia’s cognitive symptoms. Their study will appear in the June 29 issue of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
The new compound, PHA-543,613, is believed to mimic nicotine’s biochemical effects in the brain in enhancing cognition. More than 80 percent of people with schizophrenia are heavy smokers, and scientists believe smoking may be a form of self-medication for the disease. PHA-543,613 improved cognitive functioning in animal tests, including object recognition and P50 gating – a common test to measure auditory information processing. The researchalso provides additional support for the hypothesis that such compounds represent a novel, potential pharmacotherapy to treat the cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. One has been shown in separate reports to improve cognitive functioning in healthy human volunteers.
You can find the paper through its DOI – 10.1021/jm0602413 – here. Just cut and paste the number into the yellow science toolbox on that page and click the DOI go button. If you’d like to add this toolbox to your website, please grab the simple javascript and slot it into a suitable position on the page. The team at the Usefulchem blog are already using the companion science search box.