Promising treatments for mental illness are failing to reach patients simply because they aren’t profitable enough. Dr Gabriella Gobbi, a leading neuropsychopharmacologist, has issued a stark warning that the global drug development system is being crippled by venture capital and profit motives.
In a new interview published in the journal Brain Medicine, Dr Gobbi — a Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and the incoming president of the Collegium Internationale of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP) — challenged the current logic of drug discovery.
“My greatest fear concerns the future of psychopharmacology and drug discovery,” Dr Gobbi stated, “not because the science is failing, but because a greedy system oversees innovation today.”
She explained that while public funding adequately supports early academic research, the crucial and vastly more expensive later stages — such as first-in-human clinical trials — rely entirely on private investors who prioritise profit margins over medical needs.
“We may lose good, non-expensive treatments because a greedy, capitalistic system controls which drug will finally be brought to market,” she warned.
Bedside to bench breakthroughs
Dr Gobbi’s distinguished career has been defined by translating clinical bedside observations into rigorous laboratory science. Growing up in central Italy, she was inspired by her grandfather, who died under Allied bombing in 1945 after writing from a German prison to insist his children receive the education he was denied.
After battling through a highly gatekept Italian academic system in the 1990s, a chance conversation at a 1998 conference in France led her to join McGill University in Montreal, where she has remained for over two decades.
In the early 2000s, Dr Gobbi noticed a painful clinical pattern: adolescents who smoked cannabis were subsequently developing depression marked by a profound inability to feel pleasure, known as anhedonia. Taking this observation to her lab, her team uncovered vital links between cannabinoids, the brain’s serotonin systems, and depression.
This pioneering work has accumulated over 1,700 citations and directly influenced Canadian public health policy. Dr Gobbi even testified before the Canadian Senate to help shape legislation that raised the legal age for cannabis access and strictly regulated cannabis advertising.
Psychedelics and sleep
Alongside her cannabis research, Dr Gobbi’s laboratory has been investigating psychedelics since 2013, long before the current clinical renaissance brought the field into the mainstream.
Her team has successfully characterised the prosocial and anti-anxiety effects of LSD, and is now expanding its research to include psilocybin, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT to find objective neurophysiological biomarkers of psychedelic action in humans.
Furthermore, her parallel research programme into the poorly understood melatonin MT2 receptor has led to the development of a first-in-class drug candidate for restorative sleep and neuropathic pain, which is now rapidly moving toward clinical development.
Hidden tax on women in science
Beyond the economics of drug development, Dr Gobbi is a fierce critic of the structural gender inequality embedded within academic science.
As the first female President-Elect in the CINP’s 70-year history, she actively campaigns against the “hidden tax” placed on female scientists. She points to structural erosions such as unequal access to administrative support, women being diverted toward low-visibility service work, and a conference culture that actively disadvantages researchers with disproportionate caregiving responsibilities.
“This is the cause that fires me up the most,” she stated. “Changing the structure of our scientific culture so excellence is recognised without imposing an additional, hidden tax on women.”
Despite her immense success, Dr Gobbi admits she wishes she had sought out mentorship and leadership training much earlier in her career to help navigate the complex management and grant-writing systems.
However, she remains fiercely driven by the profound joy of scientific discovery. Her happiest moments, she revealed, occur when obscure data suddenly aligns to provide “the feeling that nature has briefly lifted a corner of the veil, and that an experiment is no longer just results on a page but a story that finally makes sense.”
