ECNP Medicines Chest

Background 
ECNP would like to assist clinical researchers obtain access to pharmacological tools important for the pursuit of their studies. Frequently, many potentially useful drugs are not exploited in clinical research for a variety of reasons: for example, they are poorly documented by companies in the event that their development is discontinued. In addition, clinical researchers are frequently unaware which agents are potentially available for research purposes, how to acquire such drugs, and the conditions under which they can be exploited.

We hope to help overcome such problems by acting as an intermediary between companies and researchers, and already several pharmaceutical companies have agreed to participate in this endeavour.

We now have several compounds in the Medicines Chest; please click here for a list of drugs (link is accessible to ECNP members only). For each of the compounds, there are various accompanying documents which provide non-confidential information, for example publications and information on compound properties. This 'members only' area also contains instructions on how to apply for access to compounds in the chest.

Call for applications — D1 receptor antagonist shortly to be available for clinical use
The ECNP Medicines Chest, set up to help provide access to clinical-stage drugs for use in experimental medicine studies, will shortly have a D1 receptor antagonist available for clinical use. The highly selective dopamine D1 receptor antagonist, ADX10061, is currently being synthesised. The full synthetic route has been tested at small scale and the scale-up of the clinical material has just started. It is expected that 150g of clinical-grade material will be available by the end of July 2024, and this will then be formulated into 18mg capsules for use in humans, along with appropriate placebo capsules. Capsules should be available early 2025. This has been made possible through a grant from the Wellcome Trust and with assistance from Addex Pharmaceuticals. Several academic groups (Imperial College London, Kings College London, and the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol/Portsmouth) are developing protocols to test the effects of the D1 antagonist in human volunteers, studying the impact on cognition, addiction and on brain activity using non-invasive imaging. These are acute studies and are expected to use only a small fraction of the total amount of drug that will be available.

Anyone who is interested in applying to use the compound in clinical studies should contact David Nutt via e-mail.

Update
The latest ECNP Medicines Chest report includes:

• Background
• Status
• Other compounds
• Contracts
• Funding opportunities