Organization reports progress on multiple fronts in the PTSD arena, including policy, research, advancing therapeutics and personalized medicine

Cohen Veterans Bioscience (CVB), a translational research public charity organization dedicated to fast-tracking personalized diagnostics and therapeutics for brain health, today provides a progress update on critical post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) programs, and issues proceedings from the first State of the Science Summit focused on PTSD.

Since the launch in November 2015 of its Veterans-focused programming, CVB has set an aggressive roadmap to ensure precision diagnosis and targeted therapeutics are a focus of national efforts and milestone-driven research:

Policy:

Beyond the Million Veterans Program: Barriers to Precision Medicine

• Dr. Magali Haas, President and CEO, Cohen Veterans Bioscience, as a representative organization of the Coalition to Heal Invisible Wounds, healinvisiblewounds.org, testified yesterday in front of the House Committee Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Health Hearing, “Beyond the Million Veterans Program: Barriers to Precision Medicine” about the urgent need for policy reforms to widen and expedite the pipeline for new therapies and diagnostics to treat PTSD, traumatic brain injury (TBI) and suicide prevention. To watch the hearing, click here.

Research:

Psychiatric Genomics Consortium PTSD Group (PGC-PTSD): Landmark Study

• Cohen Veterans Bioscience, in collaboration with the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, provided funding to support the largest genome-wide association study of PTSD to date. This study involved more than 60 multi-ethnic datasets including more than 30,000 PTSD cases and 170,000 controls contributed by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) PTSD Working Group. This global, landmark study has identified six genome-wide significant loci involved in PTSD risk, and implicates novel biological pathways in PTSD. Current findings can be found here.

State of the Science Summit on Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: Proceedings

• Cohen Veterans Bioscience is leading the development, advocacy and implementation of a Brain Trauma Blueprint (BTB) to help guide development efforts and accelerate the progression toward a new generation of precision diagnostics and targeted therapeutics for trauma related brain disorders. The development of the BTB is facilitated through a series of State of the Science Summits (SOSS) that fosters collaboration across a multidisciplinary stakeholder community of academia, government, industry, military and research. The inaugural SoSS explored the state of the science in diagnosis of trauma-related brain disorders with a major focus on PTSD. Working groups surveyed the current scientific landscape, identified knowledge gaps, and considered new evidence-based scientific and clinical models to fill these gaps. The outcome will be a prioritized list of specific recommendations that addresses the identified knowledge gaps across PTSD, with dissemination to legislators, public and private funding organizations, academia, researchers, industry and the public to inform the next generation of translational research. The Consensus Document will be shared later this year. Read the State of the Science Summit PTSD Proceedings here.

Therapeutics:

Award-Winning Solution for Insomnia: SleepWell

• Insomnia is a common symptom of PTSD that can have debilitating effects. Approximately 70-91% of PTSD patients have difficulty falling or staying asleep. Circady‚àö¬•, an innovative insomnia treatment created from our digital health research program SleepWell, won a 2019 MedTech Breakthrough Award for “Best Sleep Monitoring Solution.” For more information, click here.

Progressing Therapeutics: Adaptive Platform Trial

• With many Veterans suffering despite available treatments, and only two medications having undergone FDA approval in the past 17 years, there is an urgent need to study existing and new treatments. Cohen Veterans Bioscience was recently awarded a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense Medical Research and Materiel Command to establish a clinical trial infrastructure for PTSD pharmacotherapeutics and to conduct one of the first studies in the field utilizing innovative adaptive platform trial design. Learn more about the Adaptive Clinical Trial, which will start in the first half of 2020, by clicking here.

Personalized Medicine:

Advancing A Personalized Medicine Approach: Brain Imaging Biomarker Study

• In April 2019 we announced findings from a study identifying a PTSD brain imaging biomarker, revealing that a patient’s biotype may determine which PTSD treatment could work best. The study is the first to demonstrate that PTSD patients can be reproducibly sub-divided into distinct groups based only on their biological signature, which is an important first step in advancing a precision-medicine approach for PTSD. Psychotherapy is currently first-line treatment for PTSD, but now with the brain imaging biomarker discovered in this study, we may be able to identify which patients will respond to psychotherapy and which will not in advance of treatment, giving clinicians a powerful tool to personalize therapy and to guide people towards the most effective treatment options for them. The study, entitled Using fMRI Connectivity to Define a Treatment-Resistant Form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” and funded in part by CVB, appears in the April 3 edition of Science Translational Medicine. Read the press release here.

In our first three years, our Veteran-focused goal was to build a fundamental infrastructure which enables us to find a PTSD diagnostic and pave the way for therapeutic studies. We are delivering upon the approach and leveraging enabling platforms to deliver these results across many fronts,” said Magali Haas, President and CEO, Cohen Veterans Bioscience. We are pleased with the progress of our alliance network, and with the continued collaborative efforts of our colleagues across the field we can advance PTSD solutions that much sooner. Our Veterans, and others who suffer from the devastating effects of PTSD, deserve it.”

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