The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Most remarkably is, once you socially isolate a mouse and it becomes aggressive, you can never put it back in its cage with its brothers from its litter because it will kill them all overnight, but if you give it this drug, which is called osanetant, that blocks Tachykinin-II, that mouse can be returned to the cage with its brothers and will not attack them, and seems to be happy about that for the rest of the time.
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And in fact, there are drugs that block the receptor for tachykinin which were tested in humans and abandoned because they had no efficacy in the tests that they were analyzed for. If you give those drugs to a socially isolated mouse, it blocks all of the effects of social isolation. It blocks the aggression, it blocks the increased fear and the increased anxiety, and Moriel described it, "The mice just look chill." It's not a sedative, which is really important, it's not that the mice are going to sleep.
when mice are socially isolated for two weeks, there is this massive upregulation of Tachykinin-II in their brain. In fact, if you tag the peptide with a green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish, genetically, the brain looks green when the mice are socially isolated 'cause there's so much of this stuff released. And she went on to show that that increase in tachykinin is responsible for the effect of social isolation to increase aggressiveness and to increase fear and to increase anxiety.
And she found remarkably that when mice are socially isolated for two weeks, there is this massive upregulation of tachikinan 2 in their brain. In fact, if you tag the peptide with a green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish, genetically the brain looks green when the mice are socially isolated because there's so much of this stuff released. And she went on to show that that increase in tachi kynanin is responsible for the effect of social isolation to increase aggressiveness and to increase fear and to increase anxiety.
Most remarkably is once you socially isolate a mouse and it becomes aggressive, you can never put it back in its cage with its brothers from its litter because it will kill them all overnight. But if you give it this drug which is called osanotonant that black blocks tachikinanine too that mouse can be returned to the cage with its brothers and will not attack them and seems to be happy about that for the rest of the time.
And I've been really interested in trying to get pharmaceutical companies to test this drug, which has a really good safety profile in humans, in testing it in people who are subjected to social isolation stress or bereavement stress.
And in fact there are drugs that block the receptor for tachiein which were tested in humans and abandoned because they had no efficacy in the tests that they were analyzed for. If you give those drugs to a socially isolated mouse, it blocks all of the effects of social isolation. It blocks the aggression. It blocks the increased fear and the increased anxiety. And that Moriel described it. The mice just look chill. It's not a seditive, which is really important. It's not that the mice are going to sleep.