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The BioCentury ShowAuthor: BioCentury
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Ep. 102 - Psychiatry R&D: Steve Paul on Serendipity, Engineering and What Drives Real Breakthroughs
Episode 102
Thursday, 5 February, 2026
With disease biology still murky and trials notoriously noisy, psychiatry R&D is advancing fastest where teams can solve engineering problems. Delivery, selectivity and tolerability fixes are turning long-standing hypotheses into usable medicines, says veteran CNS drug developer Steven Paul. Few drug developers have had a closer view of the field’s false starts — and occasional breakthroughs — than Paul, who has moved from NIH to pharma R&D leadership and now to company building at Karuna, acquired by BMS for $14 billion, and Seaport.In conversation with The BioCentury Show's Selina Koch, Paul explains why serendipity still plays a disproportionate role in psychiatric drug development and how critical it is for teams to engineer and execute their way from an unexpected signal to a usable medicine. He also discusses psychedelics, brain shuttles, Karuna’s muscarinic approach in schizophrenia, and the delivery and trial-design choices Seaport is using to revisit neuroactive steroid biology in depression.View full story: https://www.biocentury.com/article/658314#PsychiatryTherapeutics #CNSDrugDevelopment #BiotechEngineering #Psychedelics #NeuroScience00:00 - Introduction01:32 - Psychiatric Drug Discovery06:56 - The Karuna Story22:09 - What’s New in Depression32:06 - Gene Therapies, Brain Shuttles33:53 - Psychedelics
