Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

Think even just in cancer.

Think about in cancer, which used to be, of course, an incurable disease a century ago.

Think about leukemias in children.

They were like 90% lethal in the 50s and the 60s.

Today, they are maybe 10% lethal.

And that is because a lot from these patients, right, it's very easy to collect.

We've been bringing it to the lab, studying it, what goes wrong, and then deploying molecular biology to develop therapeutics.

With the brain, sadly, you know, there's no way of doing it.

And so largely to, you know, what we've been trying to do is like find a way of shortcutting that process.

But I do believe that the major challenges that we're facing in understanding brain disorders, whether they're neurological or psychiatric, are on one hand problematic.

you know, the inaccessibility of the organ of interest, the brain.

And on the other hand, our challenges are very often defining some of these conditions with biological markers because they're much more complex.

And there's not.

Epidemiologically, there's no evidence.

Right.

And then, of course, the other issue is also that these conditions are disorders of the human brain.

So if you think about it, even talking about schizophrenia, right, hallucinations or phenomena that are very difficult to study.

And, of course, we don't know this.

We know that schizophrenia is present in almost every population that we know of, even isolated population at 1%.

And again, it's a little bit easier because it's done in adults.