PsychoGenics Appoints Mark Day, Ph.D. as Senior Director, Cognitive Neuroscience

TARRYTOWN, N.Y.--(EON:Enhanced Online News)--PsychoGenics Inc., announced the appointment of Mark Day, Ph.D., as Senior Director, Cognitive Neuroscience. This appointment reflects the company’s expansion and commitment to the cognitive neurosciences.

“PsychoGenics is committed to further expanding its efforts in cognitive neuroscience”

Prior to this appointment, Dr. Day led and supported several programs aimed at developing cognitive treatments for Schizophrenia and for Alzheimer’s at Wyeth Neuroscience and at GlaxoSmithKline. While at Wyeth, he also led the Discovery Translational Neuroscience efforts and was responsible for the development and implementation of discovery and clinical biomarkers to attenuate clinical attrition rates in Phase II. Dr. Day has extensive experience in developing novel behavioral models of learning and has employed these models to dissociate the circuitry involved in encoding, consolidation and recall of memory.

“PsychoGenics is committed to further expanding its efforts in cognitive neuroscience,” explained Dr. Emer Leahy, President and CEO. “We are delighted that Mark has agreed to join the company to direct our cognitive neuroscience group which includes several talented senior scientists and associates. Mark will play an active role in developing novel models of learning, including high throughput models which will be employed in psychiatric and neurodegenerative drug discovery. I am confident Mark will add significant value to PsychoGenics’ internal and partnered research and his drug development expertise will be a great asset as we continue to expand our drug discovery programs.”

PsychoGenics’ Cognitive Neuroscience group has developed numerous standard behavioral tests such as novel object recognition and Morris water maze and is actively developing additional tests such as the 5-choice serial reaction test, and experimental models of temporally graded amnesia. Building on its successful in vivo psychiatric drug discovery platform, the group is also developing novel high throughput cognitive platforms that capture long term memory processes and short term memory and executive functions to help identify drug candidates for the treatment of cognitive impairment associated with psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, such as schizophrenia, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and Alzheimer’s disease. PsychoGenics further supports internal and partnered drug discovery with several neuropsychiatric mouse models, including genetically modified models of Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and ADHD.

About PsychoGenics:

PsychoGenics is a leader in preclinical behavioral neurobiology and a provider of customized and innovative solutions for central nervous system (CNS) drug discovery. PsychoGenics works with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academic institutions and not-for-profit research foundations to address such major neurological disorders as: ALS, Huntington’s Disease, anxiety, cognitive impairment, depression, psychosis/schizophrenia and SMA. PsychoGenics supports the understanding and treatment of CNS disorders by offering an extensive range of established and customized validated in vivo behavioral tests, behavioral pharmacology, phenotyping, bioinformatics, microdialysis and radiotelemetry.

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