The Week of

Leal Therapeutics raised an additional $30 million in Series A funding while launching a Phase 1b/2a clinical trial of LTX-001, its experimental schizophrenia treatment. The financing includes a new investment from Eli Lilly, alongside existing investors, including OrbiMed and SV Health Investors’ Dementia Discovery Fund.

LTX-001 is particularly interesting because it takes a different approach from traditional schizophrenia drugs. Rather than focusing primarily on dopamine, the oral drug inhibits GLS1, an enzyme involved in glutamate production in the brain. Earlier Phase 1 testing showed favorable safety and tolerability, along with evidence that the drug was hitting its intended target. The new trial will test LTX-001 in adults with schizophrenia, with initial results expected before the end of 2026. The new funding will also help advance Leal's separate LTX-002 program for ALS. Here’s more: https://substack.com/home/post/p-211752095.

The FDA accepted Teva’s New Drug Application for ecopipam, an experimental treatment for children and adolescents with Tourette syndrome. Regulators also granted the drug Priority Review, with an FDA decision expected in late Q1 2027.

The application is backed by positive Phase 2b and Phase 3 results. In the Phase 3 study, pediatric patients who responded to ecopipam and remained on treatment experienced a 53% lower risk of relapse over 12 weeks compared with those switched to placebo. If approved, Teva says ecopipam would be the first new treatment specifically indicated for pediatric Tourette syndrome in more than a decade and the first with a novel mechanism of action in more than 50 years. Check it out: https://substack.com/home/post/p-211893197.

Researchers at Monash University have completed what they describe as the world's largest single-site brain-imaging study of psilocybin, providing new evidence that a person's surroundings and activities can significantly influence how the psychedelic affects the brain.

They gave psilocybin to 62 healthy adults and used brain imaging to examine their responses while resting, meditating, listening to music, and watching a movie. They found that psilocybin made normally distinct brain networks less separated, but those networks reorganized differently depending on what participants were doing and experiencing. People who showed stronger brain reorganization also reported more positive psychological changes the following day.

Using AI, researchers were able to measure these changes individually, raising the possibility that clinicians could eventually use brain imaging to predict which patients are most likely to benefit from psychedelic therapy. The findings also reinforce the importance of "set and setting” when psilocybin is used therapeutically. Here’s more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10910-z.

Did you know that researchers at USC have developed an AI model that can estimate the biological age of individual brain regions?

The model was trained using MRI scans from nearly 15,000 cognitively healthy people and creates detailed 3D maps showing which parts of the brain appear to be aging faster than expected.

When researchers applied the technology to people with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's, they found accelerated aging in areas closely associated with memory and cognition, including the hippocampus and amygdala. Those patterns also correlated with lower cognitive test scores.

The technology isn't ready for routine clinical use yet, but researchers believe it could eventually help identify dementia risk earlier, track disease progression, and even measure whether experimental Alzheimer's treatments are slowing degeneration in specific parts of the brain. Check it out: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2532233123.