Chairs: Richard Keefe, PhD; Stephen Marder, MD

A variety of non-pharmacologic treatments such as cognitive remediation, psychosocial interventions, and behavioral therapy have demonstrated clear but modest benefit for patients across different diagnostic groups.  Given the potential for drug treatment to improve cognitive skills such as attention, encoding, and retrieval, it is possible that pharmacologic intervention may serve to enhance the impact of non-pharmacologic treatment.  However, the best designs for addressing the efficacy of pharmacologic-behavioral combination therapies have not been described, and several methodological and conceptual challenges remain.  In this session, Don Goff will describe the scientific rationale for combination therapies based upon models of the pharmacology of brain plasticity and practice-related methods utilized in combination therapies to treat the symptoms of PTSD. Bob Hamer will address the statistical challenges of examining the efficacy of two treatments and their potential interaction concurrently.  Nicholas DeMartinis and David Walling will describe the challenges they have met in designing and implementing their feasibility pilot study on the impact of pharmacologic treatment on computerized cognitive remediation in schizophrenia.  Tom Laughren will address the regulatory perspective on combination therapies.  Atul Pande will comment on the interest of industry in developing drugs that may be utilized only on a short-term basis to facilitate behavioral treatments.  Steve Marder will lead a group discussion with audience participation.