to advance education and research in the science of psychopharmacology for the public benefit

INSIDE 1 Elections 2 2015 Summer Meeting Report 3 Trainees’ Workshop at the BAP 2015 Summer Meeting 4–16 2016 Prize Winners 16 Ian Reid Memorial Prize; Anna-Monika Prize 17 2016 Summer Meeting 18 Else Kroner Fresenius Foundation Prize; BAP to Attend Student Neuroscience Conferences 19 BAP at BPS Pharmacology 2015; Fundamentals of Clinical Psychopharmacology 20–21 Members Activities 22 The Drugs Work: the truth about statins and SSRIs 24–26 Education Events

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NEWSLETTERSeptember 2015

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Election for BAP Council Members – RESULTS 2015Below are the results reported to the Annual General Meeting on 27 July in Bristol:

Professor Ciara McCabeProposed by Professor David Nutt

Seconded by Professor Catherine Harmer

Dr Peter TalbotProposed by ProfessorThomas Barnes

Seconded by Professor Jo Neill

Professor Angela RobertsProposed by: Professor Barbara Sahakian

Seconded by: Professor Trevor Robbins

As a result of Professor McCabe’s move from the casual vacancy post, Professor Angela Roberts was appointed by Council to this post until 2016.

2 September 2015

BAP 2015 Summer Meetingby Marcus Munafò

After several years spent in Harrogate, BAP Council felt that it was time for a change of scene for our summer meeting. After our anniversary meeting in Cambridge in 2014, the next stop was Bristol, which welcomed the summer meeting for the first time. Bristol has a long-standing tradition of world-class psychopharmacology research, so it felt like a natural home.

The meeting opened with a series of activities on the Sunday, including an expert seminar in schizophrenia, a pre-clinical workshop on reproducibility, relevance and reverse translatability in animal research, and a BAP special session on the management of weight gain and metabolic disturbances in psychosis. This was

followed by a reception at the beautiful Royal West of England Academy, where delegates mingled with their colleagues amongst the art.

The main activity began on Monday, with the usual mix of symposia, guest lectures and poster sessions, as well as a number of satellite symposia. One of my favourites (partly because I helped to set it up!) was the joint symposium between BAP and the British Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP), which featured at both

the BAP and BABCP meetings. This was intended to showcase awareness of the activities of both organisations, and highlight areas where there are opportunities for collaboration.

The conference dinner was held at Bristol Grammar School, the alma mater of BAP’s very own David Nutt, who enjoyed showing people where his old desk was. The dinner was another highlightof the meeting, taking place in the 150-year-old Great Hall. After the dinner the prizes the BAP awards were announced, the highlight being the Lifetime Achievement Award, which was awarded to Professor Trevor Robbins. After a brief hiatus in 2014 due to space constraints, the traditional disco was reinstated, and the evening ended with dancing of variable quality under the Gothic architecture of the Great Hall.

The challenges of setting up a meeting on the scale of the BAP summer meeting at an untested site shouldn’t be underestimated – enormous efforts by the BAP staff ensured that the meeting was a success. There were certainly some teething problems, but for the most part feedback was very positive, with the welcome reception and dinner being particular well-received (along with our scientific content, which continues to be the key strength of our meeting).

Time will tell whether we will return to Bristol – in 2016 we will visit Brighton, and in 2017 we will return to Harrogate. However, our hope is that the summer meeting, as BAP’s flagship event, can move around the UK, north, south, east and (south) west, to reflect the broad geographic distribution of our membership, and the many centres of excellent psychopharmacology research in this country.

Stephen Stahl’s Expert Seminar in Schizophrenia

Welcome Reception at the Royal West of England Academy

Dinner in the Great Hall, Bristol Grammar School

September 2015 3

Trainees’ Workshop at the BAP 2015 Summer Meetingby Oliver Howes

The BAP takes supporting the next generation of clinical and pre-clinical scientists seriously. We do this in a number of ways, including offering discounted trainee membership, support to attend our meetings, training in clinical and non-clinical psychopharmacology, and generous prizes and bursaries to recognise the work of trainees and support them to attend our meetings and other conferences (see the website). We also run a dedicated trainees' workshop at our annual meeting to help students and early career researchers develop their careers. Feedback was very good this year, with 100% of attendees saying it was useful! We look forward to holding another one next year. Please don't hesitate to make suggestions for topics or speakers.

Katie Beck, one of the trainees, gives her impression of the workshop:

"The BAP trainee workshop is a very valuable session for all junior researchers taking their first steps in their academic career. Whist starting out in research is an exciting time with endless potential opportunities, it is also a challenging time- identifying a research area, group and supervisor, navigating a work life balance, writing proposals and publications, completing post graduate qualifications and getting the CV up to scratch. In the recent workshop, it was reassuring to hear Prof Trevor Robbins identifying these as common issues for all junior researchers. His advice on how to tackle some of these areas in his 10 (plus a few extra!) ways to success was very useful and highly relevant to those starting out. It was notable that a few senior academics were spotted hiding in the back row – keen to gain insight into Prof Robbins secrets to success. It was also nice to see a number of undergraduate students asking about how to go about getting their first research placement.

Prof Robbins was followed by three group sessions which allowed for smaller, more informal groups with lots of opportunities for questions. A session on careers in industry with Hugh Marston was very interesting and gave real insight into what a job in the area would entail (pros and cons) and how to go about applying for jobs in industry. A session on clinical research and funding opportunities with Oliver Howes and Joanna Jenkinson from the MRC provided very useful, up to date information, including on applying for fellowships. The third session was with Catherine Harmer who spoke about juggling research with life outside work – a session which generated a huge number of questions about what is possible and what a future in academia would really look like. These sessions also generated discussions between trainees working in different research areas and institutions which also proved very informative and interesting. I would recommend this workshop to anyone thinking about a career in research.”

Trevor Robbin’s Secrets of Success in Science presentation can be viewed on the BAP website at www.bap.org.uk

4 September 2015

2015 Prize WinnersZ XCongratulations goes to all our winners at this year’s Summer Meeting.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Professor Trevor Robbins CBE BA MA PhD FRS FMedSci FBPsSThis year’s Lifetime Achievement Award went to Professor Trevor Robbins of University of Cambridge.

Professor Robbin’s full biography can be found in last month’s newsletter, June 2015.

Hannah Steinberg BAP Conference Bursary

Alice Russell (King’s College London)I am a last-year PhD student working in Carmine Pariante’s Stress, Psychiatry and Immunology Laboratory at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.

I developed an interest in research during the academic year I spent on placement with Dr Susan Pawlby, Developmental Psychologist on the National Perinatal Unit, as part of my degree in Applied Psychology. There I collected data on mother-infant interaction in postpartum women with severe mental illness. This led me to work as a research assistant, at the then-called Institute of Psychiatry, assisting with,

and later coordinating, clinical trials in psychosis. For example, I worked on trials of Modafinil for negative symptoms of Schizophrenia, and a novel cannabis derivative for iatrogenic weight-gain.

Three years ago an opportunity arose for me to move into a role as coordinator of an MRC-funded study aiming to further understand the role of inflammation in the development of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. After a short time in this role, I was lucky enough to be supported to embark on my PhD on the project. Working in the Stress, Psychiatry and Immunology lab has brought many great writing opportunities, including publishing book chapters and reviews on the link between inflammation and psychotic disorders, as well as on the biological mechanisms under pinning Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I have also presented my work at many international conferences, including all of the BAP Summer Meetings from 2013 onward. I recently had my first, first-author report published on inflammation and metabolic outcomes in a first episode Psychosis sample, a very proud moment! In the Lab we’re also supported with public engagement, and last year I was runner up in our schools heats for the ‘3MT’ - three-minute thesis competition - for my verbal explanation of my project to a lay audience within this short-timeframe. This later led to my involvement in the ‘Parade of Stars’ event at the IoPPN where I was able to give a slightly longer talk on my work.

Being awarded the Hannah Steinberg bursary by the BAP topped off the end of a very exciting and successful academic year for me, as a junior researcher. It was an honour to have received it, and provided a great boost as I start my third and final year of my PhD.

September 2015 5

Ciara is active in public engagement and has appeared on TV (Channel 4 Dispatches and BBC1) and on Radio talking about her work on depression. She has also appeared in print (e.g. The Guardian). In 2014 she spoke at the Cheltenham Science Festival and the Institute of Physics Public Lecture series and will talk at SciBar in Oxford, Cafe Scientific in Reading and at the University of Reading Public Lecture series in 2015 about her work on the neurobiology of depression and anti-depressant treatment.

Claire Gillan (New York University)Junior Non-Clinical Award

Claire Gillan is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow based jointly at New York University (NYU) and University of Cambridge. At NYU, Claire leverages computational modeling and large-scale online data collection to identify trans-diagnostic markers of psychiatric disturbances. Under the mentorship of Nathaniel Daw and Elizabeth Phelps, this data-driven methodology has already been used to reveal psychiatric traits that are more reliable and have greater neurocognitive significance than the existing DSM diagnostic categories. The ultimate goal of this basic work is to develop an evidence-based, dimensional framework for understanding psychopathology.

Claire completed a BA in Psychology at University College Dublin before starting her PhD in Psychology at University of Cambridge in 2009 under the supervision of Professor Trevor Robbins. Here, she revealed that patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) have a tendency to form habits excessively in a series of innovative laboratory studies. Following a successful viva in 2013, Claire was awarded an MRC Centenary Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out an investigation of the neural basis of these habit biases in OCD. Claire’s work on habit learning in OCD has been published widely and eminently - including two first author research papers in the American Journal of Psychiatry and two in Biological Psychiatry. Claire was listed as one the top 30 thinkers under 30 by the Pacific Standard in 2014. Her research has featured in numerous media outlets including Scientific American, New Scientist and in two BBC documentaries.

Psychopharmacology Awards

Ciara McCabe (University of Reading)Senior Non-Clinical Award

Ciara McCabe is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Reading (Head: Neuroimaging of Reward Group: NRG) http://www.ciaramccabe.co.uk/nrg.html where she collaborates with preclinical psychopharmacologists, clinicians (Charlie Waller Institute and Berkshire Health Foundation Trust, NHS) and industry scientists (GWpharma Ltd and Forest Laboratories, INC, USA). She examines human reward dysfunction in depression and the effects of antidepressant treatments on the neural response to reward.

Ciara has attended every summer BAP meeting since 2008. In 2008 she was awarded a British Association of Psychopharmacology, (BAP) Lilly Fellowship and in 2010 she was awarded a European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Fellowship Award to attend the annual meeting in Amsterdam. In 2012 she was awarded The International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP) Rafaelsen Young Investigator’s Award, as part of the biannual meeting in Stockholm. In 2014 she received a University of Reading Celebrating Success Award. Ciara also received an In-vivo Training Initiative Award from the BAP in 2014 and 2015. Ciara has recently received the Senior Non-Clinical Psychopharmacology Award from BAP in 2015.

6 September 2015

Robin Carhart-Harris (Imperial College London)Junior Clinical Award

My research career in psychopharmacology began in 2005 when I embarked on a PhD at the University of Bristol under the tutelage of Sue Wilson within David Nutt’s Psychopharmacology Unit. My thesis focused on sleep as an index of serotonergic function in MDMA users and incorporated tryptophan depletion and polysomnography. While completing my PhD, I began initiating a feasibility study to investigate the acute brain effects of psilocybin (a compound in “magic mushrooms”). After completing this, I moved to Imperial College London in 2009 to continue my research with psychedelics under the mentorship of Prof Nutt. I subsequently conducted a series of brain imaging studies, carried out at Cardiff University, involving psilocybin. These included the first ASL, fMRI and MEG studies of the acute action of a psychedelic and a number of articles have followed from this work, including papers in PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience and Schizophrenia Bulletin. In 2012, I conducted an fMRI study with MDMA that would be the focus of a television programme on Channel 4, “drugs live – the ecstasy trial”. The data from this study is published in Biological Psychiatry, the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Most recently, I have completed a combined fMRI and MEG with LSD, the first modern brain imaging study of LSD, and results have been submitted to a number of different journals for review. My research with psychedelics has taken place within a broader context of renewed interest in their therapeutic potential, has helped to highlight mechanisms by which they may be clinically useful and lay the foundations for the translation of these insights into further clinical trials. I am currently running a small-scale feasibility study designed to assess the safety and efficacy of psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression. Initial results are extremely promising. It is hugely heartening to have won this award and I am extremely grateful to the BAP. Personally, it feels symbolic, as it represents an acknowledgement of my research by an important institution within the scientific mainstream.

Valeria Mondelli (King’s College London)Senior Clinical Award

I am a Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London. I have been interested in research in psychopharmacology since 1999 when I was still a medical student in Italy. During my rotation in General Adult Psychiatry (2000-2004) and whilst still in Italy, I started to conduct various research projects in psychopharmacology and psychoneuroendocrinology of eating disorders. Because of my interest in psychiatric research and my commitment to an academic career, I relocated to UK in 2005 to work at the IoPPN, where I completed my PhD in 2009.

Since the first year I arrived in London, I started attending regularly the BAP summer meetings which I have always considered integral part of my academic and clinical development. I have been honoured to receive the junior clinical BAP Psychopharmacology award in 2010 and the BAP/Cambridge Cognition Award in 2012 for some of my work on the role of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) at the onset of psychosis and on the association between neurotrophic factors, inflammation and brain structure in patients with first episode psychosis. I have always particularly valued the educational activities offered by the BAP as well as the consistently exciting programmes of the summer meetings. The BAP summer meetings have also opened my way to a fantastic network of scientists which have fostered over the years not only important scientific collaborations, but also precious friendships.

Since 2013 I have been appointed as deputy lead for the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre Experimental Medicine and Clinical Trials cluster at IoPPN; in 2014 I have been promoted to my current position of Senior Clinical Lecturer. My current research focuses on the role of stress and of biological systems involved in the stress response in the pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders and in the interplay between physical and mental health.

September 2015 7

Undergraduate Awards

Jade Woolley (University of Southampton)I am a final year medical student at the University of Southampton. Part of my degree allows you to spend some time doing research in the fourth year, or to opt to take an additional year and complete a Masters in medical science. This was my choice as it gave me a longer period of time to complete a project, and allowed me to choose whatever I wanted to do. I have always been interested in psychiatry and particularly psychopharmacology, so I thought I would try to pursue a project in this field and see whether I was still keen on it in the end!

I was lucky enough to end up working on a project at College Keep in Southampton with my supervisor, Professor Baldwin, on the carbon dioxide model of Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and its response to pharmacological manipulation. I joined just as one study was finishing, which gave me sufficient time to learn how to take participants through the recruitment, screening and titration processes, and how to run the experimental sessions in the lab. This meant I was up to speed (with invaluable assistance from my colleagues) by the time we started a new study, this time assessing whether quetiapine can attenuate CO2-induced anxiety. Previous studies have shown mixed results when determining whether psychotropic drugs with known anxiolytic properties can reduce subjective features of anxiety in healthy subjects, and we wished to explore this further using an atypical antipsychotic drug with a mechanism of action not previously trialled in CO2 challenge.

Our results showed that, compared to placebo, quetiapine slightly reduced anxiety following CO2 challenge when measured on a visual analogue scale. Interestingly, the drug had no effect on the neurocognitive features of attention, which have been known to respond to psychotropic drugs in other studies. This adds useful information to what is known about CO2 challenge in how effectively it provides a translation model of GAD.

My experiences during my research project and in attending the BAP conferences have firmly reinforced to me that I would like to pursue this area in the future, and I hope to do so.

Gwenllian Evans (King’s College London)As a medical student at King’s College London, going into research was never expected to be high on my agenda. As I have always had an interest in neuroscience and psychiatry, when I commenced my intercalated BSc in Neuroscience, I opted to do a lab project instead of a library project for my dissertation, in order to gain a taste of the world of research. It was through this that I was introduced to my supervisor, Dr. Anthony Vernon, who accepted me as part of his ongoing work on pre-clinical antipsychotic research. My poster was entitled “The effect of chronic anti-psychotic treatment on the rat nigrostriatal system: potential relevance to tardive dyskinesia” and was based on my lab project with Dr. Vernon. We examined dopaminergic cell bodies in the rat substantia nigra and found that these were reduced following chronic olanzapine treatment. Chronic haloperidol treatment induced a similar reduction compared to vehicle; however it did not quite reach significance. Tardive dyskinesia is a common side effect of chronic antipsychotic treatment which greatly impacts on the patient’s life, but is poorly understood. We did not see any significant correlation between the neuropathology and the animal model of tardive dyskinesia, however there was a promising slight downward trend which could be explored further with a larger cohort. Now that I have graduated from my intercalated BSc with a first class degree, I will return to my medical degree, of which I have two years left. Following the completion of my medical degree I hope to either return to the lab as a PhD student, or pursue an academic foundation post with an aim to continue in the neuroscience and psychiatric fields.

8 September 2015

Margot Pikovsky (Imperial College London) I’m currently a final year medical student at Imperial College Medical School. During my intercalated BSc I undertook a degree in Neuroscience and Mental Health, in which I went on to achieve a First Class. Over my course, I was really fortunate to be lectured in some very passionate researchers in academic psychiatry, but it was particularly the material on addiction – from the pharmacological paradoxes of receptor regulation to the intricacies of clinical management – that piqued my interest and made me consider doing some research myself.

Under the supervision of Professors Lingford-Hughes and Goldstone at the Hammersmith, I started a project examining eating behaviours in gamblers. This was the focus of my poster presentation at the BAP conference in July. My project looked at self-reported questionnaire data of various pathological eating behaviours, including emotional eating, propensity to feeling hungry, restraint/dieting behaviours and responding to external food cues. Alongside these, I also looked at measures of gambling severity and impulsivity in both my gambling subjects and in controls.

I’d originally hypothesised that since both pathological gambling and problem eating are impulse control disorders there might be some kind of relationship between the two, particularly between the severity of gambling and the problem eating scores. Instead, my initial results showed no such thing, suggesting that the two disorders are distinct. I’m now doing more work exploring other parameters trying to understand why it is that there is no overlap in the pathologies of these conditions.

The BAP conference was a hugely rich and stimulating experience and was a brilliant platform for me to share my own research and engage with the research of others.

Emily Boorman (King’s College London)I am a cognitive neuroscience undergraduate student at the University of Westminster. After completing two years of my degree I opted to take an optional year out of study to gain practical knowledge of research in the field of mental health. My placement year, which is now nearing completion, has been spent working as a research worker in Carmine Pariante’s Stress, Psychiatry, and Immunology (SPI) Laboratory at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. The main focus of this year was to assist on a prospective study of interferon-α induced persistent fatigue as a model of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). My close involvement in this project has influenced a keen interest in the biological underpinnings of CFS and mental health in general. It therefore made sense for me to submit a poster on an association between childhood trauma and cortisol levels in CFS. The findings presented support the growing literature suggesting an influence of early-life trauma on cortisol levels, later on in life, within the CFS population. Implications of this may contribute to refined treatments and a greater understanding of the pathophysiology of CFS.

In my year at the SPI laboratory, I have found immense enjoyment in working on this study and have been fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to write two reviews that centre on the molecular underpinnings of neuropsychiatric illnesses. The satisfaction I have gained from the events of the last year consolidate my hopes for a future career in academia.

Being awarded the BAP undergraduate poster presentation award has been the highlight in my year on placement. The collective skills I have attained as a result of the opportunity to present my study at the BAP summer meeting are invaluable to achieving my goal for a future career in the cellular biology of mental health.

September 2015 9

Summer Meeting Poster Prizes

Mendel Kaelen (Imperial College London)On the invitation of BAP, I have been asked to write about “my chosen career path”. I was reminded of the saying that you can only find your path by walking it. My walk started with a broad interested in science (i.e. evolution theory), a subsequent plan to become a marine biologist (i.e. I liked fish), but then an eventual conversion to neuroscience (i.e. I became slightly puzzled by a question). I read an account of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) inducing spiritual experiences and an article describing dissociative effects of ketamine. This made me consider neuropharmacology as a valuable means to try answering this puzzling question that made me chose neuroscience: how does the brain produce a self?

My university time enabled me to engage with this question. I learned about its tight link with mental health, and about therapeutic use of compounds that can alter this sense of self. Presently, in my PhD programme at Imperial College, we use fMRI and MEG to study brain mechanisms of LSD and music. LSD is considered a classic psychedelic and serotonin 2A agonist. Music is considered an important element in psychedelic therapy, where it supposedly interacts with the drug to heighten emotional engagement. But also to provide a sense of grounding and continuity in the face of an experience that can be frightening at times: a temporary dissolution of

this sense of self. Herein may lie, however, the core of its therapeutic effect and in my research I aim to contribute to understanding this empirically.

I would like to thank BAP for awarding me this prize, and thereby emphasizing the value of discussing the opportunities and challenges in this field. I am also very grateful to my incredibly supportive supervisors, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and Professor David Nutt, and to the momentous efforts of Amanda Feilding from the Beckley Foundation. Foremost, at University of Groningen, Professor Jaap Koolhaas has been elementary in my career choices, and I like to dedicate this award to his invaluable mentorship in finding my own path.

Martin Egeland (King’s College London) My poster for the BAP 2015 summer meeting revisited the idea that adult neurogenesis may have a role in depression. This idea has been creating controversy in neuroscience, psychiatry and pharmacology for over a decade yet we still have no conclusive answers either for or against this hypothesis. It certainly is a complex topic and the more I learn, the more things I find that seem to ultimately affect this fascinating process. During my PhD at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden I looked closely at how the monoamine system may regulate neurogenesis. In my current work with Carmine Pariante at King’s College London (described further in our recent Nature review) I am looking at how stress and altered levels of inflammation may interact to modulate adult neurogenesis and ultimately increase the risk for depression. Data for the BAP poster actually developed by chance as a result of efforts to find a new tool to easily manipulate adult neurogenesis. Temozolomide, or TMZ, is a drug which proved to be a useful tool to study this as it decreases mitosis primarily in the CNS. I discovered that in mice, the TMZ induced neurogenesis depletion alone caused robust changes in a behavioural paradigm associated with the processing of novel situations (the novelty supressed feeding test). TMZ treated mice also had a more pronounced hormonal reaction to stress but

10 September 2015

Matthew Wall (Imanova, London) As a researcher I sit somewhere between private industry and academia. My employer (Imanova Ltd.) is jointly owned by three major London universities (UCL, King’s and Imperial) and the Medical Research Council. Imanova does contract medical imaging work for the pharmaceutical and bio-tech industries, as well as academic work with our partner institutions.

My work with electronic cigarettes started from the realisation that no previous work had looked at the neural substrates of smoking with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The effect of nicotine on the brain is well described, but all the previous work used nicotine delivered in non-standard ways (e.g. through skin patches, or intravenously. Understanding the behavioural and sensory aspects of smoking (independently of the effect of nicotine) is important as these factors may also be significant in promoting addiction. However, the issues involved with subjects smoking in the confines of an MRI scanner are formidable. How do you light it? Where does the ash go? What if the subject drops it and sets their clothes on fire?

Most of these issues are obviated by the use of e-cigarettes, which provide a close simulation of smoking. We built a simple optical-fibre device to measure the light output of the LED at the end of the e-cigarette, and in this way could record the timing and duration of subjects’ inhalations, as well as their brain activity. Our first attempt was a relatively simple feasibility study, which nonetheless produced some interesting results; some related to the behavioural aspect of smoking (activity in motor cortex as subjects raised the cigarette to their mouth) and some which may be more related to reward and addiction processes (activity in the putamen, a dopamine-rich area of the striatum). This small study is just the first step on what I hope will be a productive series of work with e-cigarettes, and I hope to be able to report on the next set of results at the BAP meeting next year.

TMZ did not did not affect other behaviours related to depression, including anxiety. This suggests that adult neurogenesis alters certain brain functions related to depression but not others. I therefore hypothesized that defects in these functions may be precursors to depression which then precipitates other symptoms as a result of prolonged dysfunction. Restoration of adult neurogenesis may therefore also be, as supported in the literature, a precursor to recovery via restoration of these certain functions.

Caroline Phelps (University of Bristol) I am a final year PhD student at the University of Bristol working under the supervision of a new collaboration between Emma Robinson, Lucy Donaldson and Bridget Lumb.

After completing an undergraduate degree in physiology, I fell into a psychopharmacology PhD by a happy accident. I started my PhD researching the sensation side of chronic pain, but after the loss of two supervisors to another university and the aforementioned new collaboration, I was given the opportunity to conduct experiments into the relatively understudied field of affective and cognitive aspects of pain.

The research I presented at the summer meeting was investigating attention in a rodent model of chronic pain. No significant baseline impairment in attention was found in chronic pain rats. However, treatment with the atypical analgesic gabapentin seemed to induce attentional deficits in sham but not pain rats. This could suggest that a detrimental effect on attention could be outweighed by analgesic action. In addition to this, rats in chronic pain appeared to have an enhanced sensitivity to the psychostimulant amphetamine, suggesting that psychostimulants may decrease cognitive performance in chronic pain sufferers.

I have found investigating the psychopharmacology of pain very interesting and so hope to obtain a post-doctoral position in a similar field.

September 2015 11

President’s Poster Prizes

Lucy Sykes (Cardiff University) I am a 4 year Wellcome Trust PhD researcher within the Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute (NMHRI) at Cardiff University. I graduated in 2010 with a BSc in Psychology and Criminology before spending a year working in a secure mental health facility with patients with schizophrenia, personality disorders and learning disabilities. I decided I wanted to pursue a research career and gained a research assistant post investigating the neural correlates of memory retrieval processes using EEG. Although this position was very rewarding, I have more of a desire to understand the ‘how’ of these phenomena, specifically their relevance to psychiatric illness and the potential for targeted treatment. I therefore applied for the 4 year PhD in Integrative Neuroscience, to establish a more rounded foundation across the field and gain a range of perspectives and techniques for studying psychiatric illness.

I am primarily interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms that may link identified genetic risk of psychiatric illness with specific cognitive symptoms of disease, particularly learning and memory. My current work focusses on the role of L-type voltage gated calcium channels and the gene CACNA1C in aspects of associative learning in both humans and animal models. To date I have found that calcium influx through these channels is necessary for the consolidation of associative memory as well as extinction and latent inhibition, which I presented at this year’s summer meeting. I am now moving on to look at these processes, among others, in a heterozygous CACNA1C knock-out model

and to investigate downstream mechanisms which may provide novel therapeutic targets for cognitive symptoms of psychiatric illness.

I am very honoured to be chosen for this prize and I would like to reiterate my thanks to the BAP for the opportunity to present my research and for organising such a successful conference.

Olivia Maynard (University of Bristol)I conducted my PhD in the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol investigating how plain (or ‘standardised’) cigarette packaging influences visual attention to health warnings. Working within the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group (TARG) and using eye-tracking technology, my research found that plain packaging as compared with branded packaging increases visual attention to warnings among non-smokers and weekly smokers. This research contributed to UK and worldwide policy debates on plain packaging legislation. However, I also observed that plain packaging did not increase visual attention to health warnings among daily smokers. Indeed, daily smokers were found to actively avoid health warnings. In the first study conducted as a postdoctoral researcher in TARG, I worked with colleagues in the School of Experimental Psychology to investigate why daily smokers were actively avoiding these warnings using electroencephalography (EEG). It was the results of this study which I presented at the BAP conference in Bristol this year as a poster entitled ‘Neural correlates of health warning avoidance among smokers’. In this study, we hypothesised that warning avoidance may be a result of one of two biases: either 1) a pre-cognitive perceptual bias, resulting from repeated exposure to warnings, or 2) a higher order cognitive bias, resulting from reduced emotional processing of warnings. We found that smokers and non-smokers showed no differences in pre-cognitive perceptual processing when viewing cigarette package health warnings. Instead, we observed that smokers showed reduced later cognitive responses to health warnings as compared with non-smokers, suggestive of reduced sensitivity to the emotional content of health warnings. These findings indicate that changing the content of warnings could increase their emotional salience and I have recently been awarded a Cancer Research UK grant to investigate this further.

12 September 2015

funding to carry out a clinical trial of ebselen in bipolar patients, which would be the ultimate test of efficacy.

Currently, I am at the Centre for Neuroimaging at King’s College, London undertaking a postdoctoral training position in PET imaging. This allows me to further develop my strong interests in psychopharmacology and develop new psychiatric agents.

Caroline Charpentier (University College London)I was delighted to be awarded a Robert Kerwin International Bursary at this year’s BAP Summer Meeting in Bristol. The bursary will enable me to attend the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting which will take place in Chicago, IL from 17th to 21st October 2015. My abstract at SfN was selected for an oral presentation, so I am thrilled to give a talk on recent data I have collected investigating risk and loss aversion biases in patients with clinical anxiety.

After undergraduate studies in Biology at the Ecole Normale Superieure of Lyon (France), I moved to London to study for my MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. I am now still at UCL, in the final year of my PhD co-supervised by Professor Jon Roiser and Dr Tali Sharot, and funded by a UCL Grand Challenge Studentship. After investigating social influences on decision-making during my MSc project, I decided to focus my PhD on the interactions between emotions and decisions. Specifically, I have used a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging measures to investigate how emotions are incorporated into economic decisions and whether manipulating incidental emotion alters subsequent decisions. More recently, my work has focused on studying these emotion/decision interactions in clinical anxiety, where both processes are disrupted, in the hope of better understand how they could be shifted back to normal.

My talk at SfN will focus on this last study in clinical anxiety, in which we demonstrate that relative to healthy individuals, anxious patients exhibit increased sensitivity to risk, but not to losses. In addition to this great opportunity for presenting my data, I am planning to make the most of the conference to meet and interact with experts in the field. I would like to deeply thank the BAP for this fantastic opportunity and contribution to my career development as a researcher.

Robert Kerwin Bursaries

Nisha Singh (King’s College London)I am very grateful to the BAP for awarding me the Robert Kerwin Bursary. This award enables me to travel to the ECNP congress at Amsterdam and present my work on ebselen, a potential new lithium mimetic.

After completing my undergraduate degree in Pharmacy from Manipal University in India, I moved to the University of Oxford to study for an MSc in Pharmacology. I was then awarded a DPhil scholarship and worked under the supervision of Dr Grant Churchill to develop novel inhibitors of an enzyme to better understand how lithium produces its therapeutic actions in the treatment of bipolar disorder.

I used a drug repurposing approach and found that a drug called ebselen, which was known to be safe in previous clinical trials for stroke, inhibits one of lithium’s most prominent targets at therapeutic concentrations. I carried out cellular and animal experiments to determine its pharmacological similarity to lithium. As the results were promising, and we knew that it was safe, I then tested ebselen in experimental medicine models known to show CNS efficacy, under the supervision of Professor Phil Cowen in the Department of Psychiatry.

This was a major undertaking and I believe that this is one of the only examples of academics successfully taking a drug not available on the market all the way from enzymatic and preclinical studies into people, without any help from the pharmaceutical industry. More recently, Professor Phil Cowen has been granted

September 2015 13

BAP Public Communication Prizes

Tom Freeman (University College London)I am based at the Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, University College London. My research interests focus on substance use disorders and in particular the development of new treatments. I am especially interested in problematic cannabis use, which presents a largely unmet yet underappreciated clinical need across Europe. I am currently working on a clinical trial investigating a new pharmacological treatment for cannabis use disorder with funding from the Medical Research Council.

I was delighted to be awarded the BAP junior public communication prize at the 2015 Summer Meeting in Bristol. In the year prior to the meeting I was involved in a range of media activities including television, radio and online articles for Channel 4, BBC Radio 4, BBC News and The Guardian. I contributed to scientific reports aimed at a general audience such as New Scientist, Scientific American Mind, BAP Information for the Public and The Psychologist. I also delivered public lectures for Pint of Science and a University College London event called ‘busting myths: just say know to drugs!’

I find that interactive events are the most rewarding and valuable way to engage with the public. They create an active dialogue between researchers and the wider community, which is usually creative, fun and educational for both parties. Last year I took part in interactive debates and activities for adults at the Kew Gardens Intoxication Season, Science

Museum London, and Secret Garden Party festival. I also helped to deliver a neuroscience event for school pupils focusing on the relationship between psychopharmacology, ethics and drugs education.

Many of these activities were a group effort and would not have been possible without Val Curran, Ravi Das, Sharinjeet Dhiman, Chandni Hindocha, Sunjeev Kamboj, Will Lawn, Claire Mokrysz, Abigail Moss, Rebecca Pope, Gráinne Schafer, Natacha Shaban and Matthew Wall (Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, University College London) and David Nutt (Centre for Neuropsychopharmacology, Imperial College London).

Akeem Sule and Becky Inkster (Hip Hop Psych) (University of Cambridge)

AkeemI am the Co-founder of HIP HOP PSYCH and an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist South Essex Partnership Trust, and Locum Consultant Psychiatrist with the Cumbria Partnership NHS Trust. I am an Honorary Visiting Research Associate at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. I am also a Research Associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge University. I am a Senior Clinical Tutor, Clinical school of medicine, Cambridge University. I have taught Psychiatry trainees/resident doctors in United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore, Egypt, Nigeria, Ireland and India. I am a member of the Association of University Teachers in Psychiatry. My medical degree was at the Ogun State University Teaching hospital, Nigeria. My Specialist Psychiatry training was with the Oxford Rotational Scheme. I have also worked at the department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford and Hammersmith PET centre as a Clinical research worker where i carried out Neuroimaging Research. I am an International member of the American Psychiatric Association.

In 2009, I was the winner of the Consultant Teacher of the Year award for Bedfordshire and Luton Partnership Trust and joint winner of the Consultant Teacher for Exams award. I have consistently been rated as the best teacher on the Stage 2 Cambridge medical school Psychiatry course for the last 4 years and I am a pioneer of the ‘Old School Hip Hop Method of Teaching’. I started this teaching Innovation with the Cambridge University Medical students using HipHop

14 September 2015

lyrics to explore neurobiological, psychopathological and Psychiatry themes to get them more interested in Psychiatry. It was this Innovation that resulted in an invitation to talk to the Cambridge Psychiatry society (student society). I invited Dr Becky Inkster to give the talk with me and HIPHOPPSYCH was born. We have since done talks at a Night club, a student society, pubs, Humanities department, prisons and festivals. Our article on rapper Kendrick Lamar broke Cambridge University facebook records reaching over 1.3 million people. Dr Inkster and I won the BAP Senior Public Communication prize at the BAP summer meeting 2015. I have a special interest in biological psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychotherapies.

I am a massive HipHop fan and a diehard Tupac Amaru Shakur fan.

BeckyIn 2002, Dr Becky Inkster finished her psychology undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, Canada, while working in psychiatric genetics at the Centre for Addiction of Mental Health, supervised by Professor James Kennedy. She gained her doctoral degree in molecular neuropathology at the University of Oxford, supervised by Professor Paul Harrison. Becky continued to build her knowledge with further experience in neuroimaging genetics, advanced statistical modelling and epigenetics at various institutions (GlaxoSmithKline with Professor Paul Matthews and Dr Tom Nichols, Imperial College,

UCL, Institute of Psychiatry). Becky is currently the Senior Project Manager for a Wellcome Trust grant (£5.4m) called NeuroScience in Psychiatry Network, supervised by Professor Ian Goodyer, and is based in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge.

Becky believes it is important to maintain a diverse range of research interests in order to foster inter-disciplinary innovation. Most recently, she co-founded HIP HOP PSYCH, which seeks to bring together the medical community and mental health service users through urban arts and culture. She has published peer-reviewed scientific articles in journals such as The Lancet Psychiatry. She jointly received the British Association of Psychopharmacology Senior Communication Prize with co-founder Dr Akeem Sule for public engagement (e.g., inside prisons, at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, in nightclubs etc.).

Becky is also undertaking a major project to investigate how online social media data can be applied to psychiatry research and clinical practice, in collaboration with Professor Peter Jones. She is currently working with several longitudinal cohorts to generate online-offline pairings with the aim of identifying novel mental health predictors. She was recently invited to speak at the Cambridge University Research Ethics Committee inaugural annual lecture. Becky is looking forward to combining her insights in this largely unexplored field with her expertise in molecular biology and her knowledge of urban culture.

September 2015 15

RCPsych/BAP Poster Prizes

Julia Gottwald (University of Cambridge)The brain has always fascinated me. I find it astonishing that electric impulses give rise to our thoughts, our feelings – our selves. To get the feel of neuroscience, I completed several internships in research institutes. My supervisors impressed me with their depth of knowledge, but I also discovered the pitfalls of highly specialised science. Only few of the researchers were truly able to understand what their colleagues in the group next door were working on. What questions they addressed, how, and why. I made two promises to myself: to avoid a specialisation for as long as possible and to communicate my research clearly.

I completed my first degree in biochemistry in Berlin, Germany. After learning the basics of biology, chemistry, maths, and physics, I felt ready to expand my knowledge about the brain. During my MSc in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford I learned about cellular, molecular, and systems neuroscience.

For my PhD, I was keen to find an excellent research group with broad, interdisciplinary interests. It is my pleasure to work with Professor Barbara Sahakian and Professor Trevor Robbins at the University of Cambridge. My research focuses on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), especially on the early stages in teenagers. We want to find out if and how they differ from adults with OCD.

My poster from the BAP summer meeting 2015 summarised some of the results. Our findings suggest that adolescent OCD patients make poorer decisions, but show better cognitive flexibility compared to adult patients. This could mean that adolescent and adult OCD are two subtypes of the disorder, with important implications for treatment.

Discussing my research with other delegates was rewarding and enjoyable. I am very pleased to have won the Royal College Psychopharmacology Special Committee poster prize, which is a great encouragement to communicate scientific findings to people outside the area and outside science.

Gabriel Jacobs (Centre for Human Drug Research, Netherlands)A special word of thanks to the Special Committee for Psychopharmacology of the Royal College of Psychiatrists for awarding me the 2015 BAP/RCPsych poster prize. Indeed an honour as a member of the Dutch minority at the annual BAP Summer meeting!

Having finished my psychiatric residency in 2013, I currently hold a clinical appointment as consultant psychiatrist in general hospital psychiatry (Free University Medical Centre, Amsterdam) and a position as post-doc researcher-clinical pharmacologist (Centre for Human Drug Research - CHDR, Leiden). Since the clinical effects of drugs in psychiatry are insufficiently explained by receptor pharmacology, I am interested in reliably quantifying the functional pharmacodynamic effects (PD) and pharmacokinetics (PK) of both innovative CNS drugs early drug development and currently registered drugs in health and psychiatric disease. For this purpose, our group performs data-intensive drug research in collaboration with industry and academia by applying multimodal measurement techniques (Neurocart©, fMRI, PET, rating scales) that are sensitive to the effects of brain penetrating compounds.

The proof-of-concept study I presented explored whether minocycline PO could prevent depressive relapse in patients with therapy resistant major depressive disorder (TR-MDD) who had responded to IV ketamine. Ketamine is a non-competitive glutamatergic

16 September 2015

Dr Anastasia Levynska Wins Ian Reid Memorial PrizeThe first ever Professor Ian Reid memorial elective prize was handed over to Dr Anastasia Levynska on the day of her graduation with an MBChB degree from the University of Aberdeen by Professor David Reid, the then Head of School of Medicine & Dentistry. The prize, initiated as a memorial to Professor Reid who died in June 2014, is to be awarded annually to the student who provides a prize-winning elective report on a Psychiatric topic. Anastasia's excellent elective report was entitled ‘Borderline Personality Disorder. Are NICE Guidelines followed in NHS Grampian?’. It was particularly appropriate that the prize was won by Anastasia as she had been inspired to undertake the elective by her teaching experiences with Professor Reid.

Anna-Monika Prize The Anna-Monika Prize is awarded biannially by to clinical scientists who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding of the neurobiological underpinnings of depression. On Tuesday 1 September, the prize was awarded to Ned H. Kalin (University of Wisconsin, USA) and Carmine Pariante (Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, UK).

X X

NMDA receptor antagonist while minocycline is a tetracyclic antibiotic which crosses the human blood brain barrier and demonstrates in vitro affinity for the P2X7 purine receptor which is assumed to regulate glutamate levels in vivo. Glutamatergic modulators with PD effects similar and/or complementary to ketamine may be valuable pharmacological tools to 1) explore strategies that may prolong ketamine’s NMDAR-mediated antidepressant effects and 2)

further elucidate the glutamatergic hypothesis of mood disorders. After 6 weeks, we found that fewer ketamine responders who were randomized to minocycline met relapse criteria compared to responders randomized to placebo. Although the sample size was small, we feel that our data provide additional support for central anti-inflammatory/glutamatergic modulation strategies in the development of novel compounds to treat mood disorders.

M. Bommers, Prof. R. Rupprecht, Prof. N. Kalin, Prof. C. Pariante, Dr. J. Stolze

September 2015 17

Brighton Centre, Kings Road, BrightonSunday 17th to Wednesday 20th July 2016

Highlights2016 Guest Lecture to be presented by Patricia Gaspar from IFM -Institut du Fer à Moulin, Paris

PLUS Post-Doc Symposium, Short Orals, Satellite Symposia and Special Sessions

9 invited symposia covering cutting-edge clinical and non-clinical psychopharmacology:

ʍ New paradigms and treatment approaches in schizophrenia

ʍ New perspectives on functions of 5-HT sub-systems

ʍ Towards a gender specific psychopharmacology: the impact of neurosteroids, gonadal steroids and oxytocin

ʍ Bipolar disorder: progress on many fronts

ʍ Ketamine and addiction: promising treatment or probable cause?

ʍ Neuronal stem cells in mental health: will neurogenesis and iPS cells give us the antidepressants of the future?

ʍ Anhedonia, apathy, amotivation, anergia? Disrupted reward processing as a trans-diagnostic construct in mental illness

ʍ Dysfunctional neuro-immune system interactions in psychiatric disorders and their relevance for novel treatment strategies

ʍ Innovation in the treatment of obesity and binge eating

Welcome Drinks Reception

Conference Dinner at the Grand Hotel including presentation of the 2016 Prizes and Awards

Abstract Submissions: 21st March 2016

For full details of the meeting go to www.bap.org.uk/summermeeting2016

2016summermeeting

18 September 2015

2017 Else Kroner Fresenius Foundation Prize: The Biological Basis of Psychiatric Disorders Nominations are now open for the 2017 Else Kroner Fresenius Foundation Prize.

The Award will be 4m Euros of which 0.5m Euros will be awarded to the winner personally and 3,5m Euros will be dedicated to the winner's future research.

The deadline for nominations is 14 January 2016. Nominations should be for a researcher in the midst of their academic career. The award ceremony will take place in June 2017.

Nominations should be sent to: med.preis2017@ekfs.de

For details please go to www.ekfs.de

Professor Barbara J Sahakian has been appointed to the International Expert Jury. Professor Peter McGuffin is Chair of the International Expert Jury.

BAP to Attend Student Neuroscience Conferencesby Prof Jo Neill President-Elect (2014-16)

BAP is fully committed to supporting the career development of young scientists, including those at undergraduate level and does so through a range of initiatives. The category of ‘Training membership’ confers a reduced annual membership fee (£20) and reduced registration fee for the annual meeting. In addition, training members can apply for a bursary to attend and present their research at the BAP annual meeting which is a superb opportunity to meet leading scientists and researchers and interact in a friendly and supportive environment. BAP provides funding to assist with project work. The BAP “in vivo training awards” are designed to support in vivo research projects for students who have not yet embarked on a PhD project. In my case, the success of this BAP funded project enabled an International student to successfully apply for an award from the University of Manchester (UoM) covering full fees for a 3 year PhD programme in my lab. This was particularly valuable to us as her country is not in a position to provide financial support. BAP also runs a biennial certificate

in non-clinical psychopharmacology aimed at training members. This is an exhausting, but enormously rewarding and enlightening experience, according to my students. BAP must be one of the few societies to provide awards and poster prizes specifically for undergraduate students.

As a further part of our commitment to communicate with young scientists I will be taking on the role of ‘BAP special envoy’ over the next 12 months to fly the flag and raise awareness of BAP within the undergraduate neuroscience community. Among other activities this will see me attending the Early Career Neuroscientist Day-ECND (back in Bristol, into the West again, see Lancet review of our summer meeting on the website, www.bap.org.uk) on September 21st to give a short presentation about BAP, meet students and answer their questions (which is in fact my day job as an academic!) The ECND is a GW4 initiative (GW4.ac.uk). I will then attend a larger meeting of the London Students’ Neuroscience Network (www.lsneuron.com) on 6-7th February 2016 to do more of the same. The aim of all this is to raise awareness of BAP and highlight the benefits of lifelong membership to early career neuroscientists. I will write a short piece in the next Newsletter about all my adventures, so watch this space!

September 2015 19

Fundamentals of Clinical PsychopharmacologyFundamentals of Clinical Psychopharmacology provides up-to-date, evidence-based and unbiased information about psychopharmacology. It spans the range of the discipline, from mode of action and side effects of drugs to meta-analyses of clinical trials. It is anchored to practice guidelines produced by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP). Care has been taken to provide an international perspective that makes it equally useful to practitioners in the US and other countries.

To buy a discounted copy of the new edition of the BAP book, Fundamentals of Clinical Psychopharmacology, published in August 2015 for £20 (RRP £29.99), please go to

www.bap.org.uk/fundamentals

BAP at BPS Pharmacology 2015

Targeting cognition: a panacea for neuropsychiatric disease?Tuesday 15 December 2015

Queen Elizabeth II Centre, Broad Sanctuary, Westminster, London, SW1P 3E

Organizer & Chair: Dr Sarah Bailey (University of Bath, UK)

ʍ Assessment of cognition and efficacy of target drugs using animal models Professor Jo Neill (University of Manchester, UK)

ʍ Novel therapies to improve cognition in schizophrenia Professor Bill Deakin (University of Manchester, UK)

ʍ Cognitive effects of antidepressant treatments: Neuroimaging approaches Professor Catherine Harmer (University of Oxford, UK)

ʍ Pharmacology of new approaches for improving cognition in Alzheimer’s disease Dr Hugh Marston (Lilly, UK)

www.bps.ac.uk/meetings/Pharmacology2015

£20 (RRP £29.99)

20 September 2015

Camilla Nord and Jonathan Roiser

Brain Hacking On Rise: Could It Make You Perkier?

Camilla talks to Tom Cheshire of Sky News on brain stimulation. Details of the clinical trial run in partnership with Jonathan Roiser were written up for the New Statesman.

15th July 2015

Oliver Robinson

What is depression?

Oliver Robinson was interviewed as part of a long piece in the Guardian newspaper asking What is Depression?

15th July 2015

Ciara McCabe

BBC Radio Berkshire

Ciara talks to Anne Diamond about chocolate and the neurobiology of depression.

15th July 2015

Lisa Heaney

Standing Up for Science means Asking for Evidence

Blog for the University of Manchester postgrad STEPS site.

9th July 2015

Stephen Lawrie

The War On Drugs Is Harmful

Stephen talks about the war on drugs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

24th August 2015

Jonathan Roiser

Depression treatment – the way forward

Jonathan talks to Lynne Malcolm of Australian Radio National to talk about depression and the brain for ‘All in the mind’.

9th August 2015

Jeff Nye

Non-Invasive Neuromodulation of the Central Nervous System: Opportunities and Challenges: Workshop Summary

Jeff co-organised a symposium on science and policy issues in non-invasive neurostimulation and the Institute of Medicine released a report.

27th July 2015

Suzi Gage

Field studies: science at Latitude festival 2015

Suzi reviews this year’s Latitude festival and its increasing science content for the Guardian.

22nd July 2015

Members’ ActivitiesA showcase for the media and public engagement activities of BAP members.

Following are some of the latest members’ activities over the past few months. All members’ activities, with links, can be found at www.bap.org.uk/members

September 2015 21

Chris Alford

Pint of Science: Caffeine - cure or curse for modern living?

Chris explored the benefits and cost of caffeine - how it can help make us more alert and perform better after a short sleep.

18th May 2015

Joe Herbert

Testosterone: Sex, Power, and the Will to Win

Reviews and interviews about Joe Herbert’s latest book. Daily Mail, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Naked Scientist radio interview.

30th April 2015

Oliver Robinson

Royal Institution Lates - Questioning Reality

Oliver Robinson led a team of UCL ICN researchers at the Royal Institution Lates event “Questioning Reality” on Friday 17th April. They discussed work with guests and ran a study called “Shocking Perspective” exploring the effect of anxiety on cognition.

17th April 2015

Have you recently engaged with the public in science via the media or public events?

As you may be aware, both the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust advocate engagement with the public regarding scientific and medical research, and BAP is keen for members to engage with the media, so that we can share our important research findings with the public, including enthusiastic students and trainees.

We would like to invite you to share your most recent media activities with us, so that we can disseminate them to the public through our website and social media.

In particular we are looking for media articles, video interviews, podcasts, websites and blogs.

Please send any links or other engagement with the media to Sarah Channing-Wright (sarah@bap.org.uk).

Andrew Mayers

Fixers - Young people fixing mental health

Andrew talks to ITV News about better education in schools regarding mental health issues.

3rd June 2015

Oliver Robinson

Normal? Festival of the Brain

Oliver Robinson participated in “Normal? Festival of the Brain” theatre festival at the Folkstone Quarterhouse, giving a talk on Sat 23rd May entitled “Anxiety and the Brain” alongside the arts programme.

23rd May 2015

Patricia Zunszain

Pint of Science: Crick Chat on Depression - The Role of Stem Cells

Dr Patricia Zunszain & Dr Francois Guillemot discussed stem cell and neuronal production. How they study the effects of certain factors on hippocampal stem cells, and how their novel models for understanding the brain could lead to improved treatments for depression.

19th May 2015

22 September 2015

The Drugs Work: the truth about statins and SSRIsby Suzi Gage

In a public lecture hosted by the British Association for Psychopharmacology and Bristol’s MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, Professors George Davey Smith and David Nutt stripped away the sensationalisation and misinformation around statins and SSRIs. They come from very different fields, George is an epidemiologist and David a psychiatrist, but both fields can help us understand the efficacy and safety of drug treatments.

George discussed statins. Statins are now probably the most intensively investigated drug in medicine, with huge number of randomised trials examining their effectiveness, and their side effects. A recent meta-analysis found them to be hugely effective. Not that you’d necessarily see that from the media, where their use has been linked to everything from baldness to memory loss, kidney damage to nosebleeds.

Of course, no drugs are without any side effects. And a lot of the media reports of statins being associated with various negative outcomes might be true, but they fail to point out that associations of the same size are seen in the control group – the nocebo effect.

Looking to the future, George, while cautioning against being too optimistic just yet about personalised medicine, pointed to genetic information as a way of looking for drug targets. If genetic variation is associated with a disease, then the genetic differences between the groups could suggest mechanisms for drugs to target.

David then moved on to talk about SSRIs. It’s clear that this is a topic he feels passionately about: he understands that people would rather have a non-drug therapy if it was possible. But, as he puts it, you can’t ‘magic away’ the need for drugs.

When papers are published that suggest SSRIs are ineffective, they are met with a huge media response, despite often having methodological flaws or anomalies. A 2008 paper, for example, only presented data from four drugs, including one which had already been removed from the market due to ineffectiveness. He contrasted this to a 2015 paper

that supported SSRIs, which received no media coverage at all.

David believes there is still a great deal of stigma around mental health, which is why sensationalized headlines are still written. The suffering associated with a diagnosis of depression is not valued in the same way as, for example, that of a heart attack, and David believes that by perpetuating the idea that depressed people don’t need medication, their suffering is devalued further.

Both speakers were keen not to overplay the limitations of pharmacological treatments, but sought to correct and clarify the biased information that often make it in to the public domain, and makes it hard to know what to believe about the course of action you should take if you find yourself unwell. But if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then George’s conflict of interest statement was enlightening, as he takes statins himself!

This is an edited version of an article which appeared online in the Guardian 31st July 2015.

September 2015 23

Join us for this very special seasonal symposium to celebrate 50 years of the BNA!

A top line-up of expert speakers will guide us through the substantial progress that

Neuroscience has made over the last 50 years. They will also consider the future of neuroscience

in their respective areas of expertise.

The 50th Anniversary Meeting of the BNA Monday 14th December 2015, King’s College London, Strand Campus www.bna.org.uk

In collaboration with the History Committee of FENS

Steven Rose Colin Blakemore Seth Grant Miles Wittington Nick Wade

John Hardy Irene Tracey Paul Matthews Alastair Compston Richard Morris John Aggleton

Plus the BNA Undergraduate and Postgraduate Award 2015,

Public Understanding of Neuroscience and Outstanding Contribution to Neuroscience

Awards! Register today at www.bna.org.uk!

24 September 2015

This residential programme provides attendees with a unique opportunity to receive training in key aspects of experimental psychopharmacology from leading researchers in the field. The course will cover the following areas, using a combination of plenary lectures, taught and practical sections, round-table debate and a team project.

ʍ Clinical Neuroscience

ʍ Pharmacokinetics in Psychiatry

ʍ The Molecular Biology of the Mind

ʍ Statistics and Experimental Design

ʍ Pre-clinical Behavioural Psychopharmacology

ʍ Combining Neurobiology and Behaviour

ʍ In vivo-Neuroimaging and electrophysiology in Psychopharmacology

Certificate in Non-Clinical Psychopharmacology Residential Course

It will benefit novice and experienced psychopharmacologists, and those working in related fields, by encouraging appraisal and refinement of experimental design and training in essential skills.

A full course programme is available at

www.bap.org.uk/nonclinical

The Royal Cambridge Hotel, Cambridge, CB2 1PYSunday 6 to Thursday 10 March 2016

£850inclusive

Professor Trevor

Robbins confirmed as

guest lecturer

Education Events

Certificate in Clinical Psychopharmacology

OverviewPsychopharmacology is the single most commonly used treatment modality in psychiatry. It is vital we use drugs to their optimal effect – matching our choices and regimes to the needs and symptoms of patients whilst minimising side effects and avoiding adverse interactions with other drugs. New drugs and new ways of using old ones regularly appear. With ever increasing demands on our professional time it is difficult to keep up to date. This programme for CPD in state-of-the-art psychopharmacology is tailored to emphasise practical everyday problems encountered by all prescribing psychiatrists.

Content includes: ʍ lectures

ʍ workshops

ʍ discussion sessions

Forthcoming Modules

Anxiety Disorders21st January 2016 – 22nd January 2016

Bristol

Child & Adolescent Psychopharmacology

10th March 2016 – 11th March 2015

Nottingham

Schizophrenia 5th May 2016 – 6th May 2016

Manchester

Substance Misuse16th June 2016 –17th June 2016

Manchester

Drug Treatments in Affective Disorders

September 2016 Newcastle

Drug Treatments in Old Age Psychiatry

October 2016 Newcastle

Registration fees£350 per 1.5 day module

To book a place go to www.bap.org.uk/certificate

Masterclasses in clinical Psychopharmacology

OverviewThe Masterclasses are held over three consecutive days, twice a year. You can register for one, two or all three days, depending on your needs and interests. The full three day package is intended to provide a state-of-the-art update in psychopharmacology for clinicians.

Content includes: ʍ a review of the basic pharmacology

of the relevant drugs

ʍ the clinical use of those drugs

ʍ discussions around relevant BAP and NICE guidelines

ʍ questions and discussion with the speakers

Forthcoming modulesDay A Schizophrenia

Substance Misuse

27th April 201623rd Nov 201626th April 2017

Hallam Conference Centre44 Hallam StreetLondon W1W 6JJ

Day B BipolarPerinatalADHD

28th April 201624th Nov 201627th April 2017

Day C DepressionAnxiety Sleep

29th April 201625th Nov 201628th April 2017

Registration fees£310 per day

£840 for all three days

To book a place go to www.bap.org.uk/masterclasses

September 2015 25

This residential programme provides attendees with a unique opportunity to receive training in key aspects of experimental psychopharmacology from leading researchers in the field. The course will cover the following areas, using a combination of plenary lectures, taught and practical sections, round-table debate and a team project.

ʍ Clinical Neuroscience

ʍ Pharmacokinetics in Psychiatry

ʍ The Molecular Biology of the Mind

ʍ Statistics and Experimental Design

ʍ Pre-clinical Behavioural Psychopharmacology

ʍ Combining Neurobiology and Behaviour

ʍ In vivo-Neuroimaging and electrophysiology in Psychopharmacology

Certificate in Non-Clinical Psychopharmacology Residential Course

It will benefit novice and experienced psychopharmacologists, and those working in related fields, by encouraging appraisal and refinement of experimental design and training in essential skills.

A full course programme is available at

www.bap.org.uk/nonclinical

The Royal Cambridge Hotel, Cambridge, CB2 1PYSunday 6 to Thursday 10 March 2016

£850inclusive

Professor Trevor

Robbins confirmed as

guest lecturer

26 September 2015

For more information about attending or presenting please contact meetings@bps.ac.uk or visit www.bps.ac.uk.

PHARMACOLOGY 2015BAP members benefi t from reduced A� liate registration at Pharmacology 2015, the fl agship meeting of the British Pharmacological Society (BPS). This three day meeting attracts over 1,000 scientists from the UK, Europe and worldwide for the latest pharmacological research and networking.The 2015 programme covers the whole spectrum of pharmacology, and features symposia on aspects of psychopharmacology:

Targeting cognition: a panacea for neuropsychiatric disease CGRP and migraine: from basis science to potential from new drugs

Register now at www.bps.ac.uk

BPS Members Complimentary

A� liate * Day registration £65.00Full registration £170.00

Non-Members Day registration £125.00Full registration £295.00

A� liate registration is o� ered to members of ASCEPT, British Association for Psychopharmacology, British Society for Cardiovascular Research, British Thoracic Society, EPHAR and the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

*

91%of attendees thought that the content of symposia was appropriate and informative

96%of attendees said that they would be likely to recommend this meeting to a friend or colleague

15−17 DecemberThe Queen Elizabeth II

Conference Centre, London

BPS-A4-Magazine ad.indd 1 20/08/2015 13:58

ONLINE CPD RESOURCEA high quality, up-to-date resource taught by top experts in their field

Reviews of recent psychopharmacology papers, regularly updated

PLUS

Multiple Choice Questions, printable certificate on completion and reading lists

Schizophrenia Substance Misuse Including Comorbidity

Bipolar Disorder Perinatal Disorders

ADHD Focussing On Adult Depression

Anxiety Disorders Sleep

Old AgeChild and Adolescent *

General Psychopharmacology

* MCQs not currently available for this module

For more information and to subscribe go to

www.bap.org.uk/onlinecpd

£120 per year

non-members

£60

per year

members and those who have registered or attended recent

BAP meetings/courses

£45per year

multiple users (10+)

Also available on iPad

For more information about attending or presenting please contact meetings@bps.ac.uk or visit www.bps.ac.uk.

PHARMACOLOGY 2015BAP members benefi t from reduced A� liate registration at Pharmacology 2015, the fl agship meeting of the British Pharmacological Society (BPS). This three day meeting attracts over 1,000 scientists from the UK, Europe and worldwide for the latest pharmacological research and networking.The 2015 programme covers the whole spectrum of pharmacology, and features symposia on aspects of psychopharmacology:

Targeting cognition: a panacea for neuropsychiatric disease CGRP and migraine: from basis science to potential from new drugs

Register now at www.bps.ac.uk

BPS Members Complimentary

A� liate * Day registration £65.00Full registration £170.00

Non-Members Day registration £125.00Full registration £295.00

A� liate registration is o� ered to members of ASCEPT, British Association for Psychopharmacology, British Society for Cardiovascular Research, British Thoracic Society, EPHAR and the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

*

91%of attendees thought that the content of symposia was appropriate and informative

96%of attendees said that they would be likely to recommend this meeting to a friend or colleague

15−17 DecemberThe Queen Elizabeth II

Conference Centre, London

BPS-A4-Magazine ad.indd 1 20/08/2015 13:58