A wide variety of disorders interfere with normal sleep. These can be classified as primary or secondary depending on etiology. Sleep disorders are common in neurological and psychiatric conditions but also occur in heartburn, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, congestive heart failure, cancer, chronic pain, blindness, and substance abuse. Drugs commonly used for insomnia include benzodiazepines, antidepressants, imidazopyridines, chloral hydrate, meprobamate, antihistamines, and combination products. All these are limited by similar side-effects such as daytime sleepiness, a hangover-like daze, lower alertness, and motor impairment. Despite this, drug development programs for insomnia have been dropping out precipitously. More than 20 compounds that were in active development in mid-2008 have now been whittled to only ten. This article outlines diagnostics and treatments in development for insomnia...

Intra-Cellular Therapies' Bright Future

Intra-Cellular Therapies (ITI) is a private New York based company founded in 2002 to commercialize technology developed at Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard's lab at Rockefeller University. "The idea was to create a platform out of the work of many postdoc's at Paul's lab who looked at intra-cellular pathways," says Sharon Mates, CEO and co-founder. "We wanted a platform so we could look at several pathways at the same time, take many proteins and many phosphorylation sites on these and put them in one platform," she states....