Dr. James Cook is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at University Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he co-leads a group of scientists who have synthesized and tested a broad series of novel drugs that display GABA-A receptor subtype selectivity and pharmacological specificity. He is a leading expert in GABA-A receptor drug targeting with more than 40 years’ experience in organic and medicinal chemistry and more than 480 scientific publications and 50 patents.

Dr. Jeffrey Witkin, now at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he has co-led the team with Dr. Cook, previously spent 17 years directing Neuroscience Discovery Laboratory at Lilly Research Labs where he headed biological efforts to discover multiple antidepressants and novel glutamate and GABA-A receptor neuromodulators. Several of these compounds are in clinical development for depression and epilepsy. Prior to working at the Lilly Research Labs, he headed the Drug Development Group for the intramural research program of the NIH for 14 years. He is a world class scientist with over 220 peer-reviewed publications and multiple scientific awards and honors.

Dr. Arnold Lippa, CSO at RespireRx, has spent the last 7 years clinically developing low impact ampakines for a variety of neuronal disorders.  He also is a leading expert in GABA-A receptors, having discovered the first drugs to distinguish GABA-A receptor heterogeneity by selectively acting at a specific subtype of GABA-A receptors.  In animal models and human clinical trials, these drugs displayed anti-anxiety and anti- convulsant properties in the absence of sedation and muscular incoordination. These findings gave impetus to the search for novel therapeutic drugs for neurological and psychiatric illnesses that display improvements in efficacy and reductions in side effects.