Advancing worldwide neuroscience and education for brain and mental health.
If you have any news to share with the public via the CINP's website or social media, please email info@cinp.org.
Due to a popular demand we are happy to announce that we have extended three deadlines.
We are proud to share the official CINP membership brochure with you, where you can find all the relevant information in one document. Feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues should they be interested in joining CINP or would simply like to know more about the college. Click the button below to download the brochure!
We are proud to present to you the CINP YouTube channel, where we will be posting videos from our congresses, messages from the CINP board and other videos stacked with highly scientific content. Subscribe now to not miss any videos!
Starting with the first video, in conjunction with the Taiwanese Society of Biological Psychiatry and Neuropsychopharmacology (TSBPN), CINP organized a symposium for local experts which was held in the Taipei 101, Taiwan consisting of four talks. Today, we would like to share the session of CINP President Professor Siegfried Kasper, who talked about therapy resistant depression by explaining the general scope of the problem.
You can visit our website for more literature. Here are the most recent articles of value to our community.
We would like to spotlight a session of the 2019 International Meeting every month by starting with a symposium on breakthroughs and controversies in insomnia (Oct 4, 14:30 - 16:00).
Dear colleagues,
After a very sucessfull programme committee meeting for the CINP 2020 World Congress in Taipei, Taiwan (June 25-28) I am happy to share the latest developments around the college with you. The preperations of the next World Congress have already started last year, but the scientific programme has been developed in the last weeks and will be shared with you soon. Thanks again to all the experts who submitted a symposium! We very much value your highly scientific input.
Coming to the 2019 International Meeting, it has been decided to extend the abstract submission deadline to June 14 to ensure late-breaking abstracts can be submitted. Further updates to the scientific programme have also been made and can be found on the conference website.
Also, to broaden our international network we have established an automatic membership application process.
Professionals that are already members of the Asian College of Neuropsychopharmacology (AsCNP) may now apply for CINP membership without an additional vetting process and their membership levels will be matched accordingly. Therefore, this process applies to the following members of the AsCNP.
The college is also in close contact with other regional and national societies all over the world to further develop this process and thereby strengthen our international relationships. Please see our membership page for more information.
For any further questions, please send an email to the CINP Head Office.
With kind regards, Prof. Siegfried Kasper CINP President
As we have announced the congress website for the CINP 2019 International Meeting in the last newsletter, we are happy to inform you that the preliminary program as well as abstract submission is now available. The deadline for submitting your abstract is March 29, 2019 (23:59 PST).
The CINP Head Office is also now accepting applications for the Rafaelsen Award. You can find the guidelines on our homepage. Please download the application form and send it back to us by April 15, 2019. Registration will open next week with the early-bird deadline on April 24, 2019. Stay tuned!
The secretariat office is working on some exciting updates this year and we can’t wait to tell you more. We hope you will stay connected and renew your membership for 2019. Please visit our website for more information and to renew.
The CINP Head Office is currently in the process of evaluating the received bids from the different destinations to host the CINP World Congress 2021 - 2025. These will be discussed in the next CINP Executive Committee meeting and the outcome will be shared with you shortly.
Visit our website for more literature. Here are the most recent articles of value to our community.
After the very successful CINP Executive Committee meeting last December we are already in full swing focusing on the future of the college. Therefore, we are currently looking at potential congress destinations until 2025 for our annual World Congress. By taking the interest of all our stakeholders into consideration, CINP will target the following continents in the next years including the list of tentative countries.
2021: South America, Brazil
2022: Australia, Australia
2023: Europe, Finland
2024: Asia, Japan
2025: South America, Argentina
Please be reminded that the list of continents is fixed and only the countries are preliminary and might change in the next months. I am happy to give you an update once all destinations have been finalized. The Call for Symposia for the next CINP World Congress 2020 in Taiwan, Taipei will close today. However, the Program Committee has decided to extend the deadline to February 6, 2019, 23:59 PST due to technical difficulties. The submitted symposia will be reviewed in preparation for the upcoming Scientific Program Committee meeting in March where the format and program of the congress will be discussed. I am also happy to announce the congress website for the CINP International Meeting 2019 this year in Athens, Greece, which will go online next week. Therefore, the Call for Posters will also be open. You will receive another email once the website is live.
Last but not least, I would like to send a friendly reminder to all our members to renew their 2019 membership to prevent it from lapsing. To renew or apply for a CINP membership, please visit our webpage for more information. At CINP we welcome and celebrate diversity among our global membership for everyone's benefit. CINP endeavors being an affirmative action organization free from discrimination. We therefore particularly wish to encourage new membership registrations from thus far underrepresented groups to ensure a balance with regard to gender, race, beliefs, etc.
The tentative congress destinations until 2025 have thoroughly been discussed in the past weeks and will be announced in the next 'Message from the President' in January.
Membership Renewal - Reminder Thank you to our members for being part of the International College of Neuropsychopharmachology in 2018.
As a member, you are part of an international community connected through a common purpose, friendships and the annual world congress where these friendships are strengthened. With upcoming new exiting projects to develop our online content for CINP members, we hope to stay connected and welcome you as one of our members in 2019 again.
The first renewal reminders have been sent out in the beginning of December and will be sent to you again tomorrow morning.You can also renew your membership by logging into your membership profile {Member_Profile_URL}. You would like to enjoy the membership benefits of CINP and become a member? Join now!
We would like to provide our community with recent relevant literature updates that are of high value for everyone. You will find more updates on our website.
Predicting Treatment Response in Depression: The Role of Anterior Cingulate Cortex - Full article here.
Making Sense of Rodent Models of Anhedonia - Full article here.
Ketamine Corrects a Deficit in Reversal Learning Caused by Chronic Intermittent Cold Stress in Female Rats - Full article here.
Comparison of rapid and long-lasting antidepressant effects of negative modulators of α5-containing GABAA receptors and (R)‑ketamine in a chronic social defeat stress model - Full article here.
Default Mode Connectivity in Major Depressive Disorder Measured Up to 10 Days After Ketamine Administration - Full article here.
CINP 2019 International Meeting
Dear colleagues, On behalf of the Executive Committee of the CINP, I am happy to inform you about the latest developments and changes within our college. The CINP Executive Committee will be meeting on December 8, 2018, in the context of the annual ACNP Congress to discuss the future opportunities of the college, the upcoming CINP International Meeting in Athens (October 3-5, 2019), future CINP World Congress destinations and committee activities to further increase the scientific content of CINP. The CINP International Meeting in Athens next year is getting closer and almost all speakers have been confirmed by now. Various international and globally recognized speakers will give various symposia about Mood Disorders, Psychosis, ADHD and Insomnia during the 2,5-day meeting. These topics will then be discussed in smaller groups during Meet-the-Expert sessions and Interactive Workshops. Further information can soon be found on the congress website. CINP is proud to announce a new affiliation with the Asian College of Neuropsychopharmacology (AsCNP), which will hold its biennial congress in October 2019 in Fukuoka, Japan. We hope this cooperation will become stronger in the future to exchange the latest global breakthroughs and developments with the Asian College and vice versa. CINP is also in close contact with other societies and colleges to further develop our international relations. The College is also happy to announce the new 'CINP Neurotransletter' which will be sent to you every other month informing the CINP community on the latest news regarding our upcoming congresses, recent developments in the world of Neuropsychopharmacology and other activities. After we redesigned our website, we will shortly introduce the CINP App which you can then download on your smartphone or tablet. This will give you the opportunity to receive all CINP related information on your smart device, whereas the app will also serve as the Congress app for our International Meeting next year. Soon, you will receive more information about the app and how to download it. With kind regards,
On behalf of the Executive Committee of the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP), I would like to welcome you to the new website representing a new era within the history of CINP. Within the next months, you will see changes taking place with regard to the look and feel of our society, but also some completely new approaches in terms of CINP membership and industry involvement. A first step towards improvement will take place on the level of our new membership database, directly connected to the new website. You will be glad to see that functionality will improve greatly as well as user-friendliness and possibilities to connect with one another also online. Simply log into your membership profile at the top right corner to enjoy your CINP membership benefits. If you are not part of CINP yet and would like to become a member of the college, feel free to apply for your CINP membership.
Since June 2018, International Conference Services (ICS) manage CINP from their Vienna Head Office and the team looks forward to making sure all your needs with regard to future congresses and membership are covered to the fullest. ICS is a global company with offices in Vancouver, Toronto, Denver, London, Barcelona and Vienna and brings valuable knowledge and experience to our association. Furthermore, I would like to announce the dates for the upcoming CINP International Meeting 2019 in Athens (October 3-5, 2019) as well as the CINP World Congress 2020 in Taipei (June 25-28, 2020). Our team started with the preparations and is doing its best to make the future meetings valuable and successful. More information will follow shortly. In the meantime, should you have any questions or concerns, please contact the CINP Head Office via info@cinp.org.
With kind regards,
Prof. Siegfried Kasper CINP President (2018-2020)
CINP are happy to inform you that the new website has been launched successfully. You will be glad to see that functionality has improved greatly as well as user-friendliness and possibilities to connect with one another, but also with the College’s Executive Committee & Council. CINP members should have received an email with their login details by now. You can log in at the top right corner. Should you not have received an email or would like to become a member, please visit the Membership Area or contact the CINP Office.
In the next months, CINP will upload more information regarding future meetings & congresses, membership and other projects. In the meantime, you can scroll through the website, read the latest issue of the CINP Journal (IJNP) or inform yourself about a potential CINP membership.
Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us under info@cinp.org or membership@cinp.org for any membership related questions.
Best regards,
Arvid Carlsson (photo by Johan Wingborg) was born in 1923 and grew up in Lund where he also studied medicine. His thesis, which he defended in 1951, was on calcium and bone tissue, but a brief stay at the laboratory of the legendary Bernard Brodie at NIH made him change his field of interest to that of brain neurotransmitters. In 1959, he became professor of pharmacology at the University of Gothenburg where he came to stay for the rest of his career. Among his many awards are the Nobel Prize, the Japan Prize, the Wolf Prize and the Jahre Prize. He was married to Ulla-Lisa, also MD, who throughout his career provided strong support for him in his work, and had five children. When Carlsson entered the field of neuropsychopharmacology, the discipline was still in its very infancy. After long-standing reluctance, the concept of chemical transmission taking place in the brain had recently achieved acceptance, but virtually nothing was known with respect to the identity of the transmitters used for this purpose. When visiting Brodie’s laboratory, which also hosted future Nobel Laureate Julius Axelrod, Carlsson was asked to explore the possible influence of reserpine, known to exert antipsychotic activity, on the release of serotonin. He suggested that one should also examine the possible influence of reserpine on catecholamines, but as this was beyond the interest of Brodie, Carlsson decided to conduct these experiments when back in Sweden. To this end, he established close collaboration with histologist Nils-Åke Hillarp, later recognized for the invention of the Falck-Hillarp immunofluorescence technique by means of which brain monoaminergic neurons could be mapped. Without any knowledge of the vesicular monoamine transporter, which we now know is the molecular target of reserpine, Carlsson and Hillarp could confirm that the drug effectively depletes catecholamines by interfering with the storage of the monoamines. Moreover, Carlsson showed that the loss of normal motor activity displayed by rabbits after treatment with reserpine was dramatically reversed upon administration of the catecholamine precursor levodopa, and that this effect was not, as he had assumed, caused by the restoration of brain levels of noradrenaline, but closely related to the formation of dopamine. Highly controversial when it was first presented, this was the main discovery for which he was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize. Needless to say, Carlsson’s reports on these pivotal experiments, conducted in Lund in the late 50’s, had an enormous impact on the development of the field. First, they suggested that dopamine, by the time regarded merely as an intermediary in the formation of noradrenaline in the peripheral nervous system, was a brain neurotransmitter. Second, they constituted the first confirmation of the feasibility of the mode of thinking that has since then dominated neuropsychopharmacology, i.e. that behavioural aberrations may be caused by more or less specific transmitter aberrations and treated with drugs normalizing transmitter activity. Third, they paved the way for the subsequent introduction by George Cotzias of the use of levodopa as treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Fifty years later, there is still no more effective drug for this disabling condition. In the 60´s, when Carlsson had moved to Gothenburg, he made another seminal discovery related to dopamine. The observations that reserpine is an antipsychotic drug, and that it reduces brain dopamine levels, had prompted several groups to explore the possibility that also other antipsychotic drugs, the recently discovered chlorpromazine and haloperidol, might reduce dopamine levels, but without obtaining support for this suggestion. Analysing transmitter turnover rather than merely transmitter levels, Carlsson however noted that these drugs elicits an increase in catecholamine turnover, and concluded that they may act as receptor antagonists, the increase in turnover most likely being an adaptive response mediated by a yet unidentified feed-back mechanism. Given that one, at the time, knew very little about synaptic regulation, including the existence of the kind of receptor Carlsson later named autoreceptor, and that receptor antagonism was far from an established mechanism of action for drugs influencing the brain, the conclusion drawn by Carlsson was a brave yet logical one, that has since then been confirmed in numerous studies. The report on the mechanism of action of antipsychotics was published in a Scandinavian journal, Acta Pharmacologica et Toxicologica, and was for several years rarely cited; when the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia had gained acceptance, it however became a citation classic. It is of note that Carlsson never cared much for the prestige of journals, or their impact factor, reasoning that a finding of sufficient importance would sooner or laterbecome well-known, regardless of where it was published. He even suggested that it might be advantageous to publish in modest journals so that one could do the obvious follow-up experiments without too much of a competition from other groups. Carlsson remained interested in the role of dopamine in schizophrenia for the rest of his career. Impressed by the vast physiological importance of dopamine transmission, he regarded blocking the dopamine D2 receptors in patients with schizophrenia being too drastic an interference, and suggested that partial D2 agonists, such as (-)-3-PPP, which was developed in his own laboratory, may have a more tolerable profile; he was hence one of the first proponents of the mode of action today exerted by aripiprazole and several other recently developed second-generation antipsychotics. However, in recent years he came to believe that there are even more effective ways of stabilizing dopaminergic activity than partial agonism. Active until the very end of his life, Carlsson hence, together with his daughter Maria, spent his last years developing a new kind of dopamine stabilizer, OSU6162, which had been shown to enhance the activity of low-activity animals and reduce it in those being hyperactive; at the age of 95, he published his last paper on this compound in the same month that he passed away. It is saddening that Carlsson did not live long enough to witness the outcome of the ongoing clinical trials where this intriguing drug is being evaluated for its proposed effect on mental fatigue. Carlsson also made important contributions to the field of antidepressants. After the serendipitous discovery by Roland Kuhn in 1957 of an antidepressant effect of the tricyclic drug imipramine, it had been reported by Julius Axelrod, in 1962, that this compound blocks the reuptake of noradrenaline, and suggested by Joseph Schildkraut, in 1965, that facilitation of noradrenergic transmission be a common denominator for antidepressants. In the late 60’s, Carlsson however showed that tricyclic antidepressants also inhibit serotonin reuptake in brain and proposed that this effect may contribute to their antidepressant properties. He suggested to Ivan Östholm, head of research at a small, nearby drug company, Hässle AB, which was a subsidiary of Astra, that they together should develop a reuptake inhibitor influencing serotonin but not noradrenaline, the result of this endeavour being zimelidine, the first of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Whereas clinical trials with this drug provided proof of the concept that depression may be treated by drugs selectively influencing serotonin, zimelidine unfortunately had to be withdrawn from the market because of a rare and reversible Guillain-Barré-like side effect. Needless to say, the suggestion that selective serotonin reuptake inhibition be a feasible mechanism for treating depression however did survive, the followers of zimelidine still being first line of treatment not only for depressed mood but also for a number of anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Asked why he had become so successful, Carlsson often underlined that he had been lucky, arriving to exactly the right place (Brodie’s lab) at exactly the right time, i.e. in the very infancy of a field that soon was to expand enormously, and also, after having returned to Sweden, having the opportunity to collaborate with a scientist with exactly the right complementary competence, Nils-Åke Hillarp. But while luck may have a played a significant role for a researcher making one important discovery, it can hardly be the major factor for someone who, like Carlsson, has made a string of seminal discoveries. Instead Carlsson’s achievements must be explained by a unique talent for scientific thinking: like few others, he could select the most promising leads from many possible alternatives, mobilize the required rethinking to interpret puzzling results in an unconventional way, and recognize a pattern, invisible to others, from a number of disparate observations. He also displayed an entrepreneurial ability to get things done, and – not least – such a genuine interest in the scientific problems that he, throughout his 70-year-long career, always avoided leading positions within the faculty as well as prestigious but time-consuming honorary assignments. His focus was always on solving scientific problems. Carlsson showed impressive creativity also with respect to how to conduct preclinical, academic research. For example, having a group of synthesis chemists working at his laboratory, providing him with novel molecules, was an unconventional but highly successful move. Several pharmacological tools resulting from this endeavour have been tremendously useful for neuropsychopharmacologists around the world, including the prototype 5-HT1A agonist 8-OH-DPAT. Moreover, as an external advisor, he prompted the above-mentioned company, Hässle AB, to profoundly change its modus operandi, hence playing a key role for its spectacular success in the 1970’s, when it developed, e.g. metoprolol for hypertension and omeprazole for peptic ulcer. Carlsson was also an atypical preclinical neuroscientist in the sense that he early on realised the importance of continual interaction with clinicians, as illustrated, e.g. by his involvement in clinical trials suggesting antipsychotic effects of the dopamine synthesis inhibitor alpha-methyl-p-tyrosine and the partial agonist (-)-3-PPP, respectively. Thus, he was a pioneer also with respect to being translational in his research. Having good self-esteem, and firmly believing in his ideas, Carlsson often defended his stance in scientific matters with considerable stringency and vigour. He also possessed a significant personal integrity that prompted him, now and then, to make authoritative contributions to the public debate, mainly on issues of research politics. But while he could be feared as opponent in a debate, he was friendly and easy-going in private encounters, conversations with him often being interleaved with joke and laughter. And although he was probably the most internationally renowned researcher in his field, he never showed the slightest trace of conceit. Thus, throughout his professional life, the intellectual issues at stake – never prestige or position – remained central for him. Young PhD students who turned to Carlsson to discuss scientific issues were encouraged and inspired by such encounters, not least because he seemed to put as much value on them as the junior interlocutor did. Numerous colleagues throughout the world have similar experiences. A preclinical pharmacologist with strong interest also in clinical matters, Carlsson can be said to personalize the spirit of CINP, of which he was a great friend and supporter. He usually attended the CINP congresses, was CINP President in 1978-80, hosted the CINP World Congress in Gothenburg in 1980, presented the final keynote lecture at the CINP World Congress 2012 in Stockholm and was named Honorary President in 2012. While it is sad that this pioneer in neuropsychopharmacology, and true friend of CINP, has now left us, we should be pleased that he, throughout his long professional life, had the fortune of making such important contributions for millions of patients around the world. Like no one else, Carlsson has showed us the societal usefulness and importance of basic neuropsychopharmacological research. by Elias Eriksson & Torgny H Svensson
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