The new management of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE: TEVA; TASE: TEVA), under CEO Dr. Jeremy Levin, is focusing its activity in new drugs on psychiatric diseases and the brain. This is the main field in which the company maintains links with the Israeli pharmaceuticals industry and Israeli academic institutions.
At the same time as it published its strategic plan, in late 2012, the company announced that it was allocating $15 million, over five years, to support interesting technologies in brain research in academic institutions and in start-ups in Israel. This is within a framework called National Network of Excellence (NNE) in Neuroscience.
Monday evening, Teva presented the research projects it has chosen to support this year. It will distribute research grants to veteran researchers, including researchers who examining drugs on the verge of development. Teva will also distribute grants to doctoral and post-doctoral students carrying out conceptually interesting research.
Teva CSO and president of global R&D Dr. Michael Hayden is in charge of the project.
To mark the event, "Globes" is presenting three new breakthrough studies in brain research.
Pain measurement
Dr. Lital Magid is a member of a group which is developing a method which uses MRI imaging to see molecules linked to the pain mechanism. The research is groundbreaking because there is currently no mechanism for objectively measuring the strength, location, and type of pain, which is always assessed on the basis of the patient's reports. Because of this difficulty, it is difficult to obtain, for example, empiric evidence that a specific treatment is "low pain".
"We're studying small molecules which relieve pain naturally in the body. These molecules act on the body's cannabinoid mechanism - the mechanism that cannabis acts on, although these molecules have no similarity to cannabis," says Magid. "We were able to change these molecules, which enables us to see them clearly in an MRI.
"We can see how natural pain relievers are created, where they migrate to, and what breaks them up. Today, there are some pain relief medications in the advanced development state, which act by inhibiting the enzymes that break up these natural pain relievers. Our technology enables us to test the effectiveness of these medications more accurately."
Magid says that monitoring these natural pain relievers in the body, their migration and dispersal could make it possible to distinguish between different kinds of pain, and to target different pain relievers for different kinds of pain.
Premature birth and social skills
Maya Yaari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Hadassah Medical Organization is a former medical student who switched to clinical psychology. She is leading a long-term study on the social skills of premature infants.
"Several studies have found that 18-40% of extremely premature infants suffer from language problems and poor social skills, up to the spectrum of autism. But these studies were based on assessment questionnaires sent to the parents, without the researchers meeting even one child," says Yaari. "It's possible that there was over-diagnosis, or that social failures were diagnosed instead of other problems, such as poor eyesight, hearing, or motor skills."
In Yaari's study, the researchers meet the infants and their parents for several hours over a period of months. "We're in the middle of the study, but we can say that the link between these infants and their parents is different from infants at full term, possibly because of the trauma over premature birth," says Yaari.
"Many of these differences close over time. It's astonishing to see the flexibility of premature babies' brains, even in children born many weeks prematurely, and their ability to survive and mature. These children have something strong and especially vigorous."
Yaari says that some of the differences might also be linked to medical treatments used in premature labor. "Oxytocin, which has been shown to be linked to social processes in healthy adults, is used to accelerate labor, and it is sometimes used when for medical reasons, doctors want to induce birth before the pregnancy reaches full term.
"On the other hand, there are births in which an Oxytocin inhibitor is used to try and stop early contractions. Both these drugs are very common, not only in the birth of premature infants, and we definitely suspect that these two substances have an effect, possibly even problematic, on the development of natural Oxytocin mechanism in newborns. This has to be examined."
Statins against Parkinson's
Violetta Rozani of Tel Aviv University is studying the link between statins (anti-cholesterol drugs) and Parkinson's disease. Several previous studies have found that people taking statins have a lower risk of developing Parkinson's. The hypothesis is that statins enter the brain where they disrupt the accumulation of fatty proteins that are involved in the disease's mechanism.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 23, 2013
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