PHOSPHOPROTEOME ANALYSIS OF ANTIDEPRESSANT DRUGS

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is written in to the NIMH Announcement #PA-02-027 entitled: Pharmacological application response Programagents and drugs for mental disorders (SBIR award). The development of new pharmaceuticals for neuropsychiatric disorders is compromised by the lack of effective and rapid methods to evaluate potentially useful compounds that arise from primary high throughput screens. This lack of pre-clinical assays exists because of the difficulty in replicating much of the complex neuronal signaling pathways in high throughput screening formats. Intracellular Therapies Inc. (ITI) is a new company founded on the premise that a fundamental understanding of the underlying scientific knowledge of neuronal signaling can lead to highly effective means of screening and evaluating new therapeutic compounds for drug development. ITI plans to develop a technological platform based on measurements of the levels of physiologically relevant phosphoproteins involved in mediating the effects of neurotransmitters. This platform is based on measurements of changes in protein phosphorylation after treatment of mice in vivo with standard compounds reflecting all known anti-depressant drug classes to produce a reference database. This database can then be used to classify and predict the action of putative anti-depressants that arise from primary high throughput screening assays.