Nick Brandon
Chief Scientific Officer Neumora
Seminars
Thursday 17th September 2026
Panel Discussion: Redefining Therapeutic Potential in Muscarinics: Interrogating the M1/M4 Debate to Advance Next Generation Neuropsychiatric Treatments
3:30 pm
- How the recent FDA approval of an M1/M4 targeting muscarinic agonist–antagonist therapy has opened the door for next generation mechanisms, prompting the field to explore which muscarinic pathways hold the greatest future therapeutic potential
- How M1 and M4 receptor modulation may diverge in future clinical applications, with emerging evidence suggesting distinct roles in cognitive processing, behavioural regulation, and symptom domains underserved by dopamine based treatments
- How advancing Phase 1 muscarinic programs is helping define optimal translational strategies for the future, including biomarker guided dosing, refined safety monitoring, and strategic choices around patient versus healthy volunteer enrolment
- How next generation M4 selective PAMs and other muscarinic focused innovations may expand the therapeutic footprint across neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative indications, positioning muscarinic pathways as a long term pillar of future CNS drug development
- Will PAMs recapitulate efficacy of orthosteric agonists, as seen with Cobenfy?
Wednesday 16th September 2026
Panel Discussion: Overcoming the Phase 2/3 Roadblock in Neuropsychiatric Drug Development: What Have We Learnt in 2026?
8:00 am
- How late stage failures continue to stem from heterogeneous patient populations and poor endpoint sensitivity, underscoring the critical need for biomarker driven stratification to boost Phase 2/3 success rates
- What 2025–2026 taught us about placebo inflation, highlighted by recent schizophrenia and depression trial outcomes, and how study site variability, digital tools, and speech/physiological biomarkers may mitigate expectation bias
- Why translational gaps persist across muscarinic, psychedelic, and neuroplasticity based mechanisms, and how emerging mechanistic and genomic biomarkers can better link target engagement with clinical effects in Phase 2/3
- How sponsors are redesigning global Phase 2/3 execution—leveraging faster moving regions, adaptive designs, and early signal-detection: to overcome long timelines, recruitment bottlenecks, and historically low CNS trial success rates
Thursday 17th September 2026
Advancing Therapeutics for Psychiatric Disease: Novel Targets & the Promise of Precision Neuroscience
3:00 pm
