The perfect drug

While Dr. Fang Liu, Senior Scientist and Tapscott Chair in Schizophrenia, Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, spends most of her time these days in the lab examining protein molecules, she began her career in medicine as a pediatrician. It was in those doctor’s offices diagnosing and treating children that she started to dream about how she could change the lives of these young patients for the better.

“You have to have a dream first,” says Dr. Liu. “I was not a scientist before I joined CAMH. But even at that time, my dream was to one day make a perfect drug: a drug without side-effects.”

But Dr. Liu learned shortly after entering the world of neuroscience that big dreams are sometimes met with fierce resistance.

In the early 2000’s when she began taking a closer look at how two types of receptors in the brain known as a ‘receptor complex’ work together, she believed that they could play a role in mental illness. But when she submitted her first scientific paper on this paradigm-shifting concept, a famous international scientist sent her a one-sentence peer review commentary: “In general, I don’t believe it.”

Eventually, that work would be published in Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world.

Further research into this class of protein complex has led to pre-clinical trials that have shown that manipulating it can disrupt the formation of traumatic memories. The hope is that a nasal spray containing these peptides could be developed and administered at the time of a traumatic event to prevent that specific event from being encoded as a memory in the brain and therefore preventing PTSD.

Some of her current work is looking at this protein complex as a biomarker for treatment response in a blood test, which could allow for faster and more precise measurements of the efficacy of an anti-psychotic drug, which in turn would allow for faster and more and modifications to existing treatments.

And as an example of the many collaborations among this dream team, she is in discussion with Dr. Vasdev about developing a unique PET-tracer to be able to explore in much greater detail the role these biomarkers play in the brain.

“I cannot tell you how excited I am,” says Dr. Liu about the potential of these and other neurological biomarkers currently under investigation at CAMH. “This will totally change the way people understand psychiatry and mental illness.”