Field: Medicine › PharmacologyType: Couldn't replicate a published resultArea: depressionTarget: mTOR activation by ketamineStage: preclinical
Hypothesis
Ketamine's fast antidepressant effect works through mTOR signalling, so ketamine would change the mTOR markers reported by Li et al. (2010).
What failed
More than a dozen experiments by four independent company labs (AbbVie, Servier, Pfizer and Alkermes) failed to detect robust effects of ketamine on those markers.
Broken assumption
Ketamine's antidepressant action works through a robust activation of mTOR.
Why
The authors conclude that the effect seems to need special conditions that are hard to identify, and they stress publishing detailed methods.
From the published paper: Popp et al. F1000Research, 2016. ↗CC BY