Abstract
People with depression have to take currently available antidepressants for months before they start to get relief from their symptoms. But scientists are on the hunt for new, fast-acting antidepressants. For example, ketamine can improve symptoms in a matter of hours, but comes with undesirable side effects such as hallucinations and out-of-body experiences. So researchers want to understand which cellular pathways ketamine turns on and off to find new antidepressant drug targets that don’t lead to acute psychiatric side-effects. Scientists at Yale University and Navitor Pharmaceuticals think they have a compound with potential. The molecule boosts activity of an important signaling hub in brain cells and rapidly alleviates symptoms of depression in rats. The team reported data on the molecule on Nov. 14 at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C. When ketamine binds to receptors on the surface of neurons, one of the downstream signaling protein complexes
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