European Mind & Metabolism Association

Industry and Academia can interact to develop new drug compounds and new tools that are a. useful to ameliorate the quality of life itself or b. (much better!) products to be sold on the market. While Industries are "private" companies that perform applied research, mainly to patent new therapeutic approaches when they are likely to lead to profit, the Academias are "public" entities that search for basic knowledge, to shed light on the biological mechanisms of psychiatric and behavioral diseases.

EMMA is committed to divulge and to highlight discoveries on new therapeutic tools for diseases of mind and metabolism (e.g., depression, mood disorders, psychoses, mental retardation, etc.) - BROWSE this section using "Prev" and "Next" buttons at footer of pages. Next >

EMMA, in collaboration with the small company PRS Italia, has developed a home cage panel, suitable for testing lab animals with operant tasks without need of moving them away of the home cage. This collaborative project is listed among EMMA's Ongoing Activities (point six). Two papers are prepared so far, one on home-cage impulsivity task (BRM) and one on gambling task (Book chapter in: Cavanna A (Ed.) Psychology of Gambling: New Research, Nova Science Publishers, USA). Any public announcement will be reported below...    

2010 - Abstracts have been just presented to the Measuring Behavior 2010 congress about two recent experiments (see Experiment Chart at point 6) which were useful (point 6a) to refine the role played by duration of timeout (and of session) in rats' ID task (Zoratto et al.) and (point 6b) to develop and validate the automated home-cage IGT task (Koot et al.).   

2008 - The home-cage operant panel was first presented to the public during the Measuring Behavior 2008 congress.  

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The new DAT-EIA diagnostic kit is almost ready (see successful titration below).

We have combined various possible dilution of samples ( on the columns, in duplicates ) ; and various possible dilutions of secondary antibody ( on the rows ) ;
We have run TWO blanks : that with NO sample ( columns 9-10 ) and that with NO 2nd antibody ( last row ) : we have the DOUBLE blank (row H columns 9-10) ... 
The measure was done on ONE sample using  the POOL of FOUR patients ; now we shall select the combination of dilutions with OPTIC value between 0.5 and 1.5 ... 
The best values are obtained with 1/50 sample + 1/40,000  2nd Ab  OR  with 1/100 sample + 1/20,000  2nd Ab. Which of these two will be used next time ?