VYZOV Prize Laureate Raul Gainetdinov Develops Medicine against Depression

VYZOV Prize Laureate Raul Gainetdinov, Director of the Institute of Translational Biomedicine and Head of Research with the Pirogov Clinic of High Medical Technologies at the St. Petersburg State University is currently working on a medicine that will target depression based on a new principle. The new drug is expected to cause fewer side effects compared to conventional antidepressants.  

Roughly 280 million people worldwide are diagnosed with depression, according to the World Health Organization. This condition can lower one’s quality of life or even make it utterly miserable, especially for someone going through a severe depressive episode. To make matters worse, some people are getting no treatment for their depression whatsoever. 

For a long time, it was believed that depression is caused by serotonin deficiency. Therefore, most existing antidepressant drugs are designed to block the breakdown of serotonin. Sadly, like so many pharmaceuticals, antidepressants may cause side effects, such as psychomotor retardation. 

A team of scientists headed by Professor Gainetdinov is currently developing a medication that would target not serotonin or other biogenic amines but their distant relatives, trace amines. The latter are present in the human body at minuscule concentrations, so a drug targeting trace amines is expected to have fewer side effects. 

“Trace amines remained unexplored for a long time, and now we are working on a pharmaceutical agent that would enable us to target serotonin and dopamine levels indirectly rather than directly,” says Raul Gainetdinov. “This way, we are hoping to get a more gentle impact on the human brain and fewer side effects compared to the conventional drugs.” 

The research team also believes that, apart from treating depression, their new medication will prove effective in reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. 

Raul Gainetdinov received the VYZOV Prize in 2023 for his discoveries regarding the dopamine system and trace amine-associated receptors, which enabled new approaches to developing pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders.