Gabriella Gobbi built her career on cannabis, melatonin, and psychedelics - then took aim at the system that decides which drugs survive

The fear that keeps Gabriella Gobbi up at night is not about the science failing. It is about the science succeeding and nobody noticing - because the compound is too cheap to interest investors.

"We may lose good, non-expensive treatments because a greedy, capitalistic system controls which drug will finally be brought to market," Gobbi states in a new interview published in Brain Medicine by Genomic Press. As incoming president of the Collegium Internationale of Neuropsychopharmacology - the first woman to hold that position in the organization's 70-year history - she is not speaking from the margins.

From Freud at fourteen to the Maudsley by way of Sardinia

Gobbi grew up in central Italy, granddaughter of a man who died under Allied bombing in 1945 after writing from a German prison to insist his children receive the education he had been denied. She picked up Freud at fourteen. In high school, she read about Rita Levi-Montalcini's discovery of nerve growth factor and decided the brain was plastic, not fixed - and that she needed to understand it.

The path to independence was not smooth. In 1990s Italy, academic positions were controlled by senior gatekeepers. Gobbi spent time at a private psychiatric hospital in a small central-Italian town, genuinely uncertain whether research would ever become her career. Then came a phone call on the evening of January 29, 1996: an invitation to sit a PhD entrance exam in Cagliari, Sardinia, the next morning. She boarded a plane at eleven that night. She won the exam. That opened a door to work with Professor Gianluigi Gessa, a landmark figure in dopamine neurobiology. Two years later, a chance conversation at a conference in Nice led to an invitation to McGill. One year in Montreal became more than two decades.

The cannabis-depression connection

Gobbi's most cited research line grew from a clinical observation. In the early 2000s, she kept seeing adolescents who smoked cannabis and later developed depression marked by profound anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure. The bedside pattern became a bench question. In 2007, her lab reported one of the first links between cannabinoids, serotonin systems, and depression. By 2010, animal models showed adolescent cannabis exposure increased vulnerability to later depressive-like behavior. By 2019, human cohort data supported the connection.

This body of work has accumulated more than 1,700 citations and contributed directly to Quebec legislation raising the legal age for cannabis access. Gobbi testified as an expert witness before the Canadian Senate and Quebec's Ministries of Health and Justice.

Melatonin receptors and psychedelics before they were fashionable

Running parallel to the cannabis work since 2006 has been a program on the melatonin MT2 receptor. Gobbi's lab helped define its localization and its role in restorative NREM sleep and neuropathic pain. A first-in-class MT2-selective partial agonist is now moving from early discovery toward clinical development. "The projects that take the longest are often those that yield the most meaningful results," she observed.

Her lab began investigating psychedelics in 2013, years before the current wave of clinical trials made the field fashionable. They characterized the anxiolytic and prosocial effects of LSD in preclinical models and identified underlying molecular mechanisms including mTORC1 signaling. The work now extends to psilocybin, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT.

The hidden tax on women in science

Gobbi speaks with notable directness about gender inequality in academic science - not just overt harassment but the quieter structural erosion: unequal administrative support, diversion toward low-visibility service work, and a conference invitation culture that disadvantages researchers carrying disproportionate caregiving burdens.

"This is the cause that fires me up the most," she said, "changing the structure of our scientific culture so excellence is recognized without imposing an additional, hidden tax on women."

The pipeline problem

Her most pointed critique targets the drug development system itself. Public funding can sustain early academic research, but the expensive steps - toxicology, first-in-human trials, phase II and III studies - depend on private investment guided by margin expectations. Compounds that cannot promise blockbuster returns simply do not advance, regardless of their therapeutic potential.

This is not an abstract concern for a neuropsychopharmacologist. Psychiatric drug development has been marked by decades of pharmaceutical companies withdrawing from the field, citing low returns and high failure rates. The compounds that survive the pipeline tend to be those with the broadest possible market, not necessarily those addressing the most severe unmet needs.

Whether Gobbi's tenure at CINP will produce structural changes to this dynamic remains to be seen. But as the first woman to lead the organization in seven decades, she is positioning the conversation where she believes it belongs: not at the bench, where the science is working, but at the boardroom table, where the decisions about what reaches patients are actually made.