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An Important Message From CEO & President Dr. Magali Haas
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
“Doing science right requires doing the right science.”
Last week, Dave DeMarco, PhD, offered this succinct quote about our approach when asked why he chose to join our board of directors and further our mission. This philosophy set the foundation for our June 2022 company-wide meeting as our team came together in Lake George, NY to brainstorm and strategize for the months and years ahead.
 In addition to the board’s participation, we were honored to hear from Frank Larkin, Chair of our Veterans Advisory Council, and 22 Jumps founder Tristan Wimmer about the most urgent challenges Veterans face today. Their moving comments imbued all of us with a deepened sense of purpose.
In this newsletter, you’ll learn more about new and exciting initiatives we’re pursuing to advance “the right science.”
We just launched a free training video series to help preclinical researchers navigate the NIH’s 2015 policy on incorporating sex as a biological variable into research. These videos, developed by our Senior Director of External Affairs Chantelle Ferland-Beckham, PhD are part of our ongoing efforts to advance best practices in preclinical research. Prior to 2015, most biomedical research was conducted solely in male animals. We’re proud to offer this valuable educational resource that will help the next generation of researchers drive discoveries that benefit everyone.
Over the past several years, psychedelics have emerged as a possible solution for treatment-resistant PTSD and other brain disorders. We’re committed to examining psychedelics as a class of therapeutics because of their potential as effective treatments. In May, our Chief Medical Officer Dr. Allyson Gage spoke at the Psychedelic Therapeutics and Drug Development Conference. She identified the need for biomarkers predictive of treatment response and raised key questions we need to answer regarding this novel category of potential therapeutics.
The need for tailored treatments is echoed below in an interview with former police officer Christian Nielsen, who overcame PTSD, but not without the difficult trial and error of finding the treatment solutions that worked best for him.
Our goal is to advance tailored treatments for PTSD so that a clinician can target the right treatment to the right person at the time when they need help most.
We remain committed to “doing science right” to lead us there.
Strength and Honor,
Magali Haas, MD, PhD
CEO & President
Cohen Veterans Bioscience
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Developed under the leadership of Dr. Chantelle Ferland-Beckham, PhD, Senior Director of External Affairs and head of educational programming for CVB, the video series was created in response to a 2015 National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy aiming to transform research design, analysis, and reporting in the preclinical sphere by ensuring that both male and female organisms were included in early-stage animal research. A similar policy was enacted nearly 20 years earlier (in 1993) mandating the inclusion of women in human studies. 
In her presentation, Dr. Gage highlighted the multiple pharmacologic targets of psychedelic compounds. She reviewed the hurdles for scalability of psychedelics as therapeutics and provided an overview of the known unknowns with this novel category of potential therapeutics, including whether the psychedelic experience is needed for the therapeutic effect.
Cohen Veterans Bioscience recently sponsored a lunch symposium at 
Our CEO & President Dr. Magali Haas and Executive Director of the BRAINCommons Dr. Maryan Zirkle recently attended the Traumatic Brain Injury Conference to discuss ground-breaking research and ways to improve TBI care.
