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Given recent news of drug company settlements, policy moves, and more, this episode is a rerun of one of our early explainers on the opioid crisis -- how do opioids work; who's to blame; and where does (and doesn't) tech come in?
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Neuroscientists have long been trying to determine what happens in the brain during sleep, but to date, they have overlooked a key player: astrocytes. These star-shaped cells were once thought to be the glue that held th...
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Move over microdosing, there is a new approach to psychedelic medicine. Psychedelics — like LSD and psilocybin — are some of the most powerful drugs that affect our brains, but their therapeutic potential has...
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Our understanding of the human brain and its disorders has always been limited by our lack of access to living, human, developing brain tissue. For the first time, that’s changing. In this episode, Sergiu Pasca, Pr...
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In this episode, we dive into the remarkable story of one American family, the Galvins: Mimi, Don, and their 12 children, 6 of whom were afflicted with schizophrenia. Robert Kolker follows the Galvin's from the 1950s to today, through, he writes, "the eras of institutionalization and shock therapy, the debates between psycho-therapy versus medication, the needle-in-a-haystack search for genetic markers for the disease, and the profound disagreements about the cause and origin of the illness itself." So this conversation, with a16z's Hanne Tidnam, is more than a portrait of one family; it covers all of how we have struggled over the last decades to understand this mysterious and devastating mental illness: the biology of it, the drivers, the behaviors and pathology, the genomics, and of course the search for treatments that might help, from lobotomies to ECT to thorazine.
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This is episode #4 of our new show, 16 Minutes, where we quickly cover recent headlines of the week, the a16z way -- why they're in the news; why they matter from our vantage point in tech -- and share our experts' views on these trends as well.
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The U.S. mental health system is under tremendous strain. Depression is now the leading cause of disability in the U.S. One in four Americans suffered from a diagnosable mental disorder in the last year, most of which we...