Dr. David Baker
Professor and associate chair of biomedical sciences Marquette University
Founder and Director of Promentis Pharmaceuticals
According to the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation one in every four people suffer from a mental illness. It is that staggering number of people that David Baker, professor and associate chair of biomedical sciences at Marquette University and his team at Milwaukee-based Promentis Pharmaceuticals is trying to help.
Baker, also founder of Promentis Pharmaceuticals, has played an integral role in changing the way the brain is studied and hopes that those changes might lead to improvements in the way society treats neurological disorders like schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, and even drug addiction.
“What we’ve discovered is that it might be that our models are wrong,” Baker said. “When neuroscientists study the brain, they study a very specific cell in the brain called a neuron. The assumption is that these are the only cells directly involved in information processing in the brain, when in fact we’ve discovered that might not be the case.”
According to Baker, the majority of cells in the brain are not neurons, and his team has begun to study a different cell in the brain called astrocytes, he said.
Baker and John Mantsch, Ph.D., founded Promentis Pharmaceuticals in 2007 to help advance research and drug development in this field.
Through their research, Promentis Pharmaceuticals has identified that astrocytes may play a more significant role in the regulation of glutamate, the most important chemical in your brain that activates specific brain cells, than previously thought.
“By identifying how this process works we can learn how critical astrocytes can be to brain function and dysfunction,” Baker said.
Promentis has received funding from private investors, grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, the State of Wisconsin, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression now known as the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. The firm has set an aggressive goal of testing their compounds on humans within three years.
Baker was nominated by William Cullinan, dean of Marquette University school of health sciences.
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