March 3, 2008

Experts in neuroscience from around the world will gather in Sacramento this month to identify ways to facilitate the translation of basic research into treatments for cognitive deficits caused by schizophrenia.
 
Sponsored by the National Institutes of Mental Health and hosted by UC Davis Health System, the conference will be held March 18 and 19 at the Courtyard by Marriott Hotel, 4422 Y St. The meeting is for scientists participating in an initiative known as Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS). Cameron Carter, UC Davis professor of psychiatry, is principal investigator of the project.
 
Experts from academia and industry are participating in the initiative. At the conference, their aim will be to reach a consensus on a set of cognitive tasks to be translated from their use in basic neuroscience research into tools that will accelerate the development of medications for cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.
 
Cognitive deficits include impairments in areas such as memory, attention and executive function, and are a major determinant and predictor of long-term disability in schizophrenia. Currently available antipsychotic medications are relatively ineffective in improving cognition.
 
Among the obstacles identified by the National Institutes of Mental Health as likely to interfere with the development of pharmacological agents for treating cognition in schizophrenia is a lack of a consensus on how cognition in schizophrenia should be measured. Through a series of consensus-building meetings, CNTRICS has addressed this issue, and at this final meeting in Sacramento, a new set of tasks will be recommended.
 
A major aim of the CNTRICS initiative is to move beyond the use of clinical standardized tasks to measure drug effects to those that employ state-of-the-art methods in cognitive neuroscience, for which there is more likely to be a corresponding animal model and through which drug effects on the human brain can be measured directly using non-invasive functional brain-imaging technologies. Those technologies are used at the UC Davis Imaging Research Center.
 
For more information on CNTRICS, go to http://cntrics.ucdavis.edu. For more information on the conference, contact Carter at (916) 734-7783 or cameron.carter@ucdmc.ucdavis.edu.