LAUSR

Schizophrenia and related psychiatric disorders present a major social burden. Mechanistic understanding of the disease pathology remains underdeveloped, and current medications are associated with limited efficacy or significant side effects. Despite much research over the last decades, knowledge from basic science has not translated effectively into the development of new medications. This dilemma is frequently referred to as crossing the ‘Valley of Death’.1 Indeed, certain pharmaceutical companies have recently decreased their investment in psychiatric disorders or withdrawn from the sector altogether. Nevertheless, with the recent advances in human genetics and basic neuroscience, we are hopeful that better therapeutics based on mechanistic insights will be accessible to patients in the near future. For these reasons, it is now crucial to foster young generations of both MD and PhD researchers who will drive a wide range of scientific progress in psychiatry from bench to bedside through interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches.