With disease biology still murky and trials notoriously noisy, psychiatry R&D is advancing fastest where teams can solve engineering problems. Delivery, selectivity and tolerability fixes are turning long-standing hypotheses into usable medicines, says veteran CNS drug developer Steven Paul. Few drug developers have had a closer view of the field’s false starts — and occasional breakthroughs — than Paul, who has moved from NIH to pharma R&D leadership and now to company building at Karuna, acquired by BMS for $14 billion, and Seaport.
In conversation with The BioCentury Show's Selina Koch, Paul explains why serendipity still plays a disproportionate role in psychiatric drug development and how critical it is for teams to engineer and execute their way from an unexpected signal to a usable medicine. He also discusses psychedelics, brain shuttles, Karuna’s muscarinic approach in schizophrenia, and the delivery and trial-design choices Seaport is using to revisit neuroactive steroid biology in depression.

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#PsychiatryTherapeutics #CNSDrugDevelopment #BiotechEngineering #Psychedelics #NeuroScience

00:00 - Introduction
01:32 - Psychiatric Drug Discovery
06:56 - The Karuna Story
22:09 - What’s New in Depression
32:06 - Gene Therapies, Brain Shuttles
33:53 - Psychedelics