Project Overview

Neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease profoundly affect aspects of cognition including memory, attention, decision making and cognitive flexibility, and contribute to diminished quality of life for millions of patients and their caregivers. At the current time there are no successful disease modifying therapeutics for these devastating conditions. Even worse, despite the urgency of the unmet need for therapeutics, major pharmaceutical companies are starting to move away from drug discovery related to these conditions. This is largely because clinical trials for therapeutics aimed at neurodegenerative disorders fail to reach final market approval more than 90% of the time, with each failure costing as much as a billion dollars.

One contributor to these failures is the mismatch between animal models and human patients. Decisions to take drugs into clinical trials with patients are based on research in animal models, but treatments that work in animal models frequently fail in patients. This is in part because efficacy in animal models is usually determined by how well the drug influences late-stage pathology in the brain, while efficacy in human clinical trials is determined by how much the drug improves cognition.

We need a paradigm shift in measures of efficacy in animal models to move the prolific discoveries that have been made about the molecular and circuit level of the brain over the past two decades toward breakthrough impact in the clinic. The Mouse Translational Research Accelerator Platform (MouseTRAP), which is centred on a unique and powerful touchscreen-based system that we have developed that allows us to assess mice on cognitive tests that are identical to those used in human patients, directly addresses this urgent and critical challenge.

Principal Investigator

Lisa Saksida , University of Western Ontario

Partners and Donors

University of Western Ontario