Editorial Contents Research Project Drug-evoked Synaptic Plasticity: a Key to Understanding Addiction?

projects in the various workpackages and clinical cohorts have been launched as planned and the emphasis now is on strengthening the interactions and collaborations between basic scientists and clinicians. Accordingly, a major effort of the NCCR has been to support initiatives that aim at a culture of sharing data and competences in particular by establishing common platforms that could be applied to the different clinical cohorts. A first initiative was launched to establish a common platform for characterizing the patients included in the different cohorts that would include common imaging modalities and protocols as well as neuropsychological tests. The NCCR has now established a sort of " pipeline " with specific imaging modalities and protocols both for fMRI and EEG as well as neuropsychological tests. In this issue of the Newsletter, Professor Bogdan Draganski describes some of the main features of this platform. We feel that this effort represents a significant achievement that has brought together basic scientists and clini-cians who now share common resources and com-petences for the characterization of endophenotypes of the patients in the different cohorts. Furthermore, in particular, as far as the imaging data are concerned, the uniformity of data acquisition through this standardized and commonly shared " pipeline " of tests will allow us to create a common database that will be shared amongst all the participants of the NCCR. This achievement represents a quite significant cultural change in the current practice of research and is certainly in line with the main objectives of the NCCR. Another defining feature of this NCCR is the establishment of a clinicians/scientists program. The goal of such a program is to provide a rigorous neuroscien-tific training to young psychiatrists with the ultimate goal of establishing a new generation of clinicians with research expertise who could strongly contribute to the future of the departments of psychiatry in Switzerland. Two young fellows, one in Geneva and one in Lausanne, were selected as the first members of the clinicians/scientists program. The first Newsletter featured an interview of Dr Marie Schaer, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Ge-neva, who works on the 22q11 cohort. In the present Newsletter we present the second fellow, Dr Philippe Baumann, who works on the early psychosis cohort. A third facet of the present Newsletter is a brief description of the project carried out by Professor Christian Luscher in the context of Workpackage 3 which …