Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

So it will take a while until we sort of like map all of them.

And then of course, there are environmental factors that we do know historically can contribute to this.

So there are

various exposures to environmental factors, like in early days, thalidomide, for instance, was one of them that we know increases the risk for autism.

Yeah.

So there's certainly, you know, it's quite complex because, first of all, the definition of the condition is quite difficult, right?

And I think that is in general like the challenge with psychiatric disorders, right?

And perhaps one of the reasons we've made such slow progress in understanding these conditions because, of course, the power of modern medicine is in molecular biology, right?

We kind of deploy this remarkable force of an understanding.

And in order to do that, you need two things.

You need, first of all, to have a very clear definition of what that disease is, generally, biologically.

Think about myocardial infarction, very clearly defined in terms of what it actually means.

You immediately have biomarkers.

The patient walks in.

You take blood.

You can immediately tell, yes, in 20 minutes, you can tell that they have a myocardial infarction based on a biomarker.

And then the other one, which is certainly very important, which to a large extent is the source of all the work that we've done, is the unbearable inaccessibility of the human brain, so to speak.

And to a large extent, the human brain is inaccessible for most of its development.

And so if you look actually across branches of medicine, you can see that there is a very strong correlation between how accessible an organ is

And how many cures or therapies we actually have.