The Need for Non-profit Psychiatric Drug Discovery and Development

Current psychiatric drug discovery and development has not produced very effective medications in the past few decades. Conventional wisdom provides reasons for failure that do not address major structural obstacles to true innovation for psychiatric drugs.

Narrative review based on analysis of the scientific literature augmented by personal experience in academic clinical research as well as in the pharmaceutical industry.

The largest obstacles to drug discovery and development are the biological invalidity of most DSM diagnoses, the economic incentives to produce short-term symptomatic treatments with blockbuster profit potential, and very low thresholds set by the FDA for ending drug discovery due to toxicity. Since these larger structural socio-economic obstacles to drug development will be difficult to change, a new proposal is made for a parallel non-profit drug discovery paradigm, to be funded by governments, akin to the development of vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic. The key public health implications are highlighted in the example of developing new drugs for Alzheimer dementia, and the potential utility of an anti-tau agent like lithium, currently ignored in drug development in favor of much more expensive and questionably effective amyloid-reducing agents.

Given the key structural problems of psychiatric drug discovery and development, a parallel non-profit drug discovery paradigm is needed to meet all public health needs, as well as to reinvigorate truly innovative and transformative research.