Breaking Boundaries: UOC and NUS Scientists Collaborate on Modified Relaxin-3 Neuropeptides for Selective Anxiety and Depression Medications

Scientists at the University of Colombo in collaboration with partners from the NUS Medicine (Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine), A*STAR’s Bioinformatics Institute, and Tohoku University, are making significant strides in finding better ways to treat anxiety, depression, and related problems. They are exploring new approaches to make medications more effective and with fewer side effects.

Traditionally, medicines for issues like anxiety and depression cause unwanted side effects because their targets affect many other physiological responses of the body, apart from the nervous system. But what if we could make medicines that only target the specific problems we want to fix? That’s what the team is investigating. So, they are figuring out how to modify or bias it to only do what they want it to.

Their recent study, published in Science Signaling (https://www.science.org/toc/signaling/17/823), showed promising results in this direction.