[Buddha-l] Buddhists May Help Biotechies Solve Big Mental Health Woes, Says Merck Vet Ben Shapiro

[S. A. Feite]

Buddhists May Help Biotechies Solve Big Mental Health Woes, Says  
Merck Vet Ben Shapiro
Luke Timmerman 8/3/09

One of the big opportunities in biotech over the coming decades may  
come from neuroscientists who team up with Buddhists. That might  
sound odd at first, but it’s no joke. This is one of the big ideas on  
the radar of Bennett Shapiro, the former executive vice president of  
worldwide basic research at Merck, who lives in Seattle, and serves  
as a senior partner with Boston’s PureTech Ventures.

Researchers are beginning to get a stronger sense of physiological  
differences in the brains of Buddhists who have been practicing mind  
training techniques like meditation for years, as compared to, say,  
the average brain of a distracted American, Shapiro says. These  
insights, based partly on brain imaging tools like functional MRI,  
are sparking new ideas about how to combine meditation techniques  
with neurological drugs, offering potential to do a better job of  
treating mental health problems, he says.

“If you want to think about the future in biotechnology, you would  
want to think about how you can help people regulate their emotions  
and attention,” Shapiro says. “If one can employ mind training in  
combination with pharmacologic therapies, one might be able to  
enhance their efficacy and thereby relieve the suffering of millions  
of people.”

Shapiro, 70, a longtime Seattleite who I met at a coffee shop near  
his house in the Magnolia neighborhood, sees these unusual  
connections between neuroscientists and Buddhists at close range. He  
serves on the board of the Boulder, CO-based nonprofit Mind & Life  
Institute, alongside the Dalai Lama himself and top neuroscientists  
like Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin. The Institute  
is trying to encourage research beyond the current drug regimens,  
like with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac,  
which Shapiro calls “blunt instruments” aimed at treating the most  
complex, differentiated organ in nature, the brain.

Even though the current drugs don’t work for everybody, and placebos  
often do remarkably well in clinical trials, these “blunt  
instruments” still add up to a lucrative market for drug companies.  
Pfizer alone generated $6 billion last year from neurology drugs, a  
17 percent gain from the prior year, making this a faster-growing  
product category for that company than cardiovascular disease, pain,  
or cancer treatments. If drugs could be made that were more  
effective, presumably the market would get a lot bigger. About one  
out of every four adults in the U.S. suffer a diagnosable mental  
disorder each year, according to the National Institute of Mental  
Health.

But what Shapiro is talking about could go a lot further than just  
diagnosable mental disorders. He’s thinking much more broadly about  
combinations of mind training and drugs that can help millions of  
children and adults. He says this sort of mind-training would be self- 
initiated and driven, not the coercive, frightening stuff from the  
movies like “A Clockwork Orange.”

If this is done the right way, Shapiro says, “Think about how people  
who meditate can control their emotions,” as well as their attention  
spans, Shapiro says. This could transform the educational system, (...)

Luke Timmerman is the National Biotechnology Editor for Xconomy. You  
can e-mail him at ltimmerman at xconomy.com, call 206-624-2374, or  
follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ldtimmerman.

http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/08/03/buddhists-may-help- 
biotechies-solve-big-mental-health-woes-says-merck-vet-ben-shapiro/