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CNTRICS II, First Meeting: Evaluating Potential Biomarkers of Cognitive Function (Oct 2009)

The focus of this meeting will be on understanding the physiological basis, measurement and interpretive issues and practicalities of functional imaging biomarkers to enhance translational research to treat cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia and related disorders. We have an outstanding slate of speakers lined up and are planning for a highly interactive day and a half. The results of the meeting will be published in a special issue of Biological Psychiatry and will lay the groundwork for an additional meeting to be held in 2010 which will identify a set of specific imaging biomarkers for the purpose of new treatment discovery and development.

 

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CNTRICS II, Second Meeting: Developing Homologous Animal Models (April 2010)

This will be the first of two meetings that have as the goal the facilitation of improved ANIMAL MODELS for treatment development for impaired cognition in schizophrenia and related disorders. This first meeting will focus on conceptual issues in model development, and include a focus on the construct of homology, the level to which cognitive and neural systems homology needs to validated in a given model, and the types of models that should be prioritized for development. Relevant issues will include which animal species to use, whether the model should measure the function of the cognitive construct in the intact animal, and the degree to which developmental or pathophysiological models contribute to or complicate the treatment development process. The talks and discussions of these issues will be organized along the lines of the cognitive constructs selected for treatment development during the first of the CNTRICS meetings. We will have an outstanding international group of experts present on each topic (see the schedule for more details) and ample discussion time after each set of talks and after each session. The results of the meeting will be published in a major translational neuroscience journal.

 

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CNTRICS II, Third Meeting: Imaging Biomarkers (October 2010)

This meeting will be held in Davis, California on the U. C. Davis Campus on October 28th and 29th 2010. At this meeting we will select a group of imaging (and TMS-based) biomarker measures that will be recommended for further development for use in treatment development research for impaired cognition into serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia. The CNTRICS process has focused on translating tools and constructs from (cognitive) neuroscience into tools that can enhance translational research and the development of effective therapies for impaired cognition in schizophrenia. During the previous set of meetings, we used a consensus-based process to develop a set of recommended cognitive tasks that are presently being refined and optimized for use in treatment development studies in follow up, NIMH funded studies.

 

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CNTRICS II, Fourth Meeting: Selecting Translational Animal Model Paradigms (April 2011)

This meeting will be held in Washington DC on April 26th and 27th (end at 3:00 pm on 27th). A major goal of past CNTRICS meetings has been to identify human experimental paradigms with high construct validity that can be developed to assess the effects of new treatments on cognition in schizophrenia. At the April 2011 meeting, we will focus on animal model paradigms that can tap the cognitive and emotional-processing constructs targeted in previous CNTRICS meetings. The content and format have been designed by the CNTRICS steering committee to assure a highly interactive meeting attended by a small (75-80 participants) highly-committed group of translational researchers from academia, industry and the NIMH. The meeting will feature brief presentations on the assessment of cognition within specific cognitive domains in animal models. The talks will be followed by breakout discussion groups evaluating experimental paradigms applied to specific cognitive functions. The second day of the meeting will also feature Panel Discussions on the roles of (1) Implementing Construct Validity and (2) Academia-Industry-Government Cooperation in development of treatment for cognition in schizophrenia. The results of the meeting will be published in a special Issue of a leading translational neuroscience journal.

 

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CNTRICS I, First Meeting: Selecting Cognitive Constructs (Feb 2007)

The first meeting was held in Washington, DC on February the 26th and 27th 2007. This first meeting focused on cognitive systems and component processes that should serve as targets for measure and treatment development. The meeting brought together a relatively small group (approximately 60 participants) of basic cognitive and social cognitive neuroscientists, clinical investigators of cognition in schizophrenia and animal modelers from academia and industry. Over a day and a half we identified a set of target cognitive systems and component processes that will be the focus, in two subsequent meetings, of psychometrically and pragmatically informed task translation and development. These tasks would be used either alone to measure the functioning of specific cognitive systems, or incorporated into neuroimaging studies (fMRI, EEG/ERP, etc) to measure the effects of treatment on the underlying neural circuitry. The products of this meeting laid the groundwork for the second meeting, which addressed psychometric issues related to the development of cognitive neuroscience measures for treatment development for impaired cognition in schizophrenia.

 

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CNTRICS I, Second Meeting: Psychometric Issues in Cognitive Neuroscience Measures Translation (Sept 2007)

The second meeting was held on Friday, September 28, 2007 at the Eric P. Newman Education Center in St. Louis, Missouri. This meeting again brought together a small group (approximately 60 participants) of psychometricians, basic cognitive and social cognitive neuroscientists, clinical investigators of cognition in schizophrenia and animal modelers from academia and industry. This meeting had two goals. The first was educational, informing basic cognitive neuroscientists about the psychometric issues involved in using cognitive tasks in clinical trial settings, and informing psychometricians and clinical trial experts about the constraints of maintaining cognitive construct validity. The second goal was to develop a consensus among the psychometricians, cognitive scientists and clinical trialists as to what acceptable metrics are for test performance and to provide suggestions as to how tasks can be altered to meet these metrics while maintaining their construct validity.

 

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CNTRICS I, Third Meeting: Selecting Measures of Cognitive Constructs (March 2008)

The third meeting was held in March of 2008 in Sacramento, CA. This meeting again brought together a small group (approximately 60 participants) of basic cognitive and social cognitive neuroscientists, clinical investigators of cognition in schizophrenia and animal modelers from academia and industry. The goal of the third and final meeting was to develop a set of candidate tasks which measure the key component processes of cognitive systems identified in the first meeting. These tasks are now the focus of subsequent refinement and norming studies using the benchmarks developed in meeting two that will optimize their design for use in clinical trial contexts.