Category: Our News

Challenge: Psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression affect 25 million of individuals in North America. Early identification of risk factors for people with genetic predispositions remains the most promising avenue for improving the treatments for these diseases. However, there are multiple subgroups of patients within a specific disease whose condition is…

Challenge: Neuroinflammation (NI) is involved in a diverse array of degenerative conditions, ranging from multiple sclerosis (MS) to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. Although treatment options are available for MS their effectiveness is not uniform and long-term use has significant side effects. NI-based disorders remain an area of high unmet medical need and new approaches and…

Challenge: The blood-brain barrier (BBB) plays an essential role in protecting the brain from blood-borne diseases. However, it blocks otherwise effective medicine from reaching the brain. Most drugs developed for treatment of central nervous system diseases fail because they aren’t optimally designed to cross the BBB. There is a need to identify natural transporters acting as…

Challenge: The development of efficient drugs targeting central nervous system (CNS) diseases remains a challenge, especially because of a lack of effective methods for studying processes occurring at the synaptic level. Protein interactions at the synapse are known to be modified under pathological conditions and to induce important changes in cellular function. Despite great advances in…

Challenge: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative movement disorder afflicting 1 to 2% of the population over 65 years of age and for which there is neither a reliable diagnostic test nor cure. Since catecholamine-regulated protein 40 (CRP40) may be involved in regulation of dopamine in the brain, it represents a potential biomarker for early…

Challenge: Protein misfolding and aggregation are implicated in diverse neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other chronic diseases such as diabetes. Currently, only cell-based screening assays have been designed and used in the discovery of new therapeutic molecules. However, these assays are limited in representing disease models because they…

Challenge: Neurological and psychiatric diseases and disorders affect more than half the population, causing a huge burden on health care costs, lost productivity, and reductions in quality of life. These disorders of the nervous system can span a range of illnesses, including autism spectrum disorders, manic disorders, Parkinson’s disease, stress, depression, and anxiety. Many of these…

Challenge: Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) are two of the most common and devastating neurodegenerative diseases, affecting one in 50 Canadians over 65 years old. A major roadblock to new drug development in neuroscience is the limited access to human neurons from affected patients. This limitation is now being addressed through the use…

Challenge: Neuropathic pain is a chronic pain disorder that can develop as a result of nerve damage caused by various medical conditions. Available treatments are very limited, and patients resort to using opioids to manage their pain, leading to dependence, tolerance and the so-called opioid-induced hyperalgesia, which is characterized by an increased pain after prolonged use…

Challenge: Chronic pain affects at least 20% of the population and its societal costs exceed those of cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes combined. Most chronic pain patients report many significant side effects from the current opiate-based treatments, including opioid addiction, and these treatments are not highly effective. New, non-opioid therapeutics are therefore needed. Solution: Professor Séguéla,…