Intravenous ketamine has been repeatedly shown to induce a rapid and long-lasting antidepressant effect in treatment-resistant patients. A 2010 Science paper by Li and colleagues described a pathway activated by ketamine and suggested to underlie antidepressant effects of ketamine. This could enable development of novel antidepressant drugs sharing ketamine’s efficacy but free from ketamine’s side-effects. However, there is important thing missing – effects of ketamine need to be robust enough for drug companies to build the drug discovery programs. Using an information sharing mechanism developed by the ECNP Preclinical Data Forum Network, several drugs companies shared their experience with this novel mechanism of action of ketamine and disclosed it in a paper published recently in the F1000 Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness Channel – read more