The two leading research centres in Bangalore, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) and the R&D Centre at Hikal Limited have teamed up for new drug development for central nervous system (CNS). The collaborative programme for basic research study on the neuro-chemical changes during depression and anxiety disorders in rodents is expected to lay the foundation for drug design development in neuropsychiatry.

The year old collaborative research programme in CNS is a first-of-its-kind initiative in India in terms of extending basic research findings in the clinical applications domain, Dr Sumantra Chatterji, scientist, NCBS and visiting faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA told Pharmabiz.

The research focuses on the effects of chronic stress and its impairment of Hippocampus, (part of the temporal lobe in the brain that deals with memory and learning). Dr Chatterji has proved that with stress, the Hippocampus neurons shrink, which in turn leads to memory problems. But in the same brain with similar stress levels, the Amygdala neuron (an almond-shaped neuro structure) enlarges and leads to enhanced anxiety. This discovery by the NCBS scientist has been acknowledged by the Dana Foundation in USA, a private entity that promotes public awareness about brain research and funding for such efforts globally. This work has also been described recently in a Special Brain Issue of Scientific American.

In a study conducted on rats at the NCBS laboratory by a team led by Dr Chatterji, it was found that when an animal was diagnosed with stress, cellular changes in the Amygdala were noticed. When the cells were found to grow bigger in the Amygdala, higher anxiety levels were noticed, which according to Dr Chatterji, is a cellular target for stress-induced emotional disorders and drugs that can counter such problems. This new model is now being extended to explore other aspects of mood disorders such as depression.

Right now, Dr Chatterji looks at the joint effort as a learning process for both Hikal and NCBS which took off only because of strong research interests in both of them. While the Hikal team led by Dr K Nagarajan, has its strengths in chemistry and would design certain drugs as part of its own effort in drug design. And if Hikal has a reasonably good candidate then it would be passed on to NCBS for research. While, this would strengthen the discoveries of Hikal's drug candidate, the NCBS scientist hopes to advance his research skills in the process and complement the research effort with NCBS' strength in biology. However, the process of transferring research for commercial purposes is a different ballgame altogether, stated Dr Chatterji who has two more research initiatives apart from Hikal with Servier in France, and Merck, in UK and USA.

The initial commitment between NCBS and Hikal was to enter into a study on indigenous compounds. The two teams wanted to undertake both the research programmes simultaneously to establish model to validate drug design in herbal medicine, which would now take off at later stage.