Chancellor Andrew Dr. Martin announced that Douglas F. Covey, the Andrew C. and Barbara B. Taylor Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine, will receive the Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Typically, honorees receive their awards and give presentations of their scholarly work during a ceremony on campus in the fall. Details about this year’s event still are being determined.

Covey

Covey is leading the way in the development of a new class of drugs, called neurosteroids, as treatments for psychiatric illness.

A specialist in the chemistry and biology of steroids, Covey has spent years synthesizing and developing neuroactive steroid molecules. He studies how they work as anesthetics and analgesics and, more recently, has been evaluating the molecules for their potential to treat neurodegeneration and psychiatric illnesses, particularly clinical depression. The compounds Covey has been developing eventually may help psychiatric patients for whom current therapies don’t work.

His laboratory also has developed methods to determine exactly how neurosteroid molecules bind to proteins on nerve cells and other types of cells in the central nervous system. In addition to helping patients with depression, various molecules Covey has developed have shown promise as potential therapies for epilepsy and essential tremor.

He is a co-founder of SAGE Therapeutics, a company that is working to bring some of those compounds into clinical use. Covey’s work helped spur a collaboration between SAGE and Washington University to discover, develop and study neurosteroids. Much of that work is done through the Taylor Family Institute for Innovative Psychiatric Research, an effort that supports research collaborations between several departments at the School of Medicine, including psychiatry, anesthesiology, developmental biology, radiology, neurology and medicine.

Covey and other scientists involved with the institute have developed sophisticated tools to study how neurosteroids alter brain function and play a role in regulating cognition, emotion and motivation.

Covey earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1967 at Loyola College in Baltimore. He went on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University. He joined the Washington University faculty in 1977.

This information was originally published in an article on Washington University in St. Louis Source.