Dr. Javier Meana

Professor Javier Meana from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has been awarded the Prize for Best Researcher of the Year 2008 in Psychiatry by the Spanish Society for Biological Psychiatry (SEPB). Meana works in the Pharmacology Department of the Medical Faculty of the University, and received the prize for his research into the pharmacological treatment of schizophrenia and depression.

The prize recognises mainly his work in three neuropharmacology areas and particularly a discovery published in the journal Nature (http://www.nature.com) on a new therapeutic target for schizophrenia, which suggests a possible new mechanism for anti-psychotic drugs.

“It came as a total surprise; I wasn’t expecting it, especially as I’m not a psychiatrist,” declared Meana, and he said that he was very grateful for this recognition of his research work. “The most important thing now is to be able to go on with the research work and get financial backing for it; and that the drug companies develop products that turn these discoveries into reality”, he stated.

A defender of translational research, “research which can be quickly turned into something practical”, Meana has focused his work around three areas; the search for diagnostic markers for mental illnesses and research into their biological basis, the evaluation of those markers as potential therapeutic targets, and the evaluation of new candidate drugs and the improvement of therapeutic strategies.

He is also interested in animal models in mental illnesses and, as an example of collaborative work with industry, he mentions a transgenic mouse model for schizophrenia which, among other applications, can be used to test anti-psychotic drugs and which has been developed together with the Basque company Brainco Biopharma.

Meana, a believer of team work, is Head of the UPV/EHU group in the Centre for Biomedical Network Research in Mental Health (CIBERSAM), and head of the Brain Bank at the UPV/EHU, which contains more than 1,200 samples and is an essential asset for research into mental illness.