In a clinical trial of about 200 patients, an experimental drug from Eli Lilly lessened schizophrenia symptoms without the serious side effects of current treatments, according to a paper published Sunday in the journal Nature.

The drug must still be tested on many more patients and is at least three to four years from completing regulatory review. But schizophrenia researchers said the trials results were surprising and impressive, especially since the drug works in a different way from existing antipsychotic medicines, all of which have serious side effects including weight gain and tremors.

Lilly will begin a new and larger clinical trial for the drug this month. If that trial confirms the results seen so far, the new drug could mark a breakthrough in the treatment of schizophrenia - and open the way to a broad new class of treatments for the disease. Schizophrenia, a devastating mental illness that affects 1 percent of adults and usually begins in the late teens or 20s, is marked by psychotic delusions as well as social withdrawal and cognitive impairment.

“This is potentially one giant step forward for patients,” said Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia and the lead investigator on a federally sponsored clinical trial of schizophrenia medicines.

Lieberman has not been involved with the development of the Lilly medicine and does not receive any payments or consulting fees from Lilly.

The new drug also has the potential to be a blockbuster for Lilly. Medicines for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder had sales of $12 billion in the United States and $18 billion worldwide last year.

The troubled history of Zyprexa, another antipsychotic medicine from Lilly, will lead regulators and psychiatrists to scrutinize the new medicine closely for hidden dangers, Lieberman said. When it introduced Zyprexa in 1996, Lilly hailed it as a breakthrough with fewer side effects than older drugs. But Zyprexa causes severe weight gain, and the American Diabetes Association has linked it to diabetes. Internal Lilly documents show that the company played down Zyprexas side effects, worrying that they would hurt sales.

Despite that history, psychiatrists will be eager to see whether the new Lilly medicine works, since the existing drugs are of limited help for many patients. Existing schizophrenia medicines, whether older drugs such as Thorazine or newer medicines like Zyprexa, all work the same way, by blocking the brains dopamine receptors.

But the new Lilly drug does not directly affect dopamine. Instead, it modulates brain activity through a different set of receptors. As a result, it has the potential to be the first truly novel treatment for schizophrenia since Thorazine was introduced 1954, Lieberman and other researchers said.

Lillys new drug - which does not have a name yet and is referred to only as LY2140023 - emerged from almost two decades of research into the similarities between symptoms of users of PCP, a street drug sometimes called angel dust, and schizophrenia. By the 1980s, scientists had discovered that PCP blocked brain receptors that are triggered by an amino acid called glutamate.

The Lilly clinical trial validated the theory that modulating glutamate receptors may control the symptoms of schizophrenia, said Dr. Joseph Coyle, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School.

PORTLAND, Ore., July 6 (UPI) — California-based Solaicx is expanding its solar components manufacturing operations to Portland, Ore.

The company has leased a 136,000-square-foot facility in Portland’s Rivergate Industrial District, where the firm is expected to use the site to manufacture mono-crystalline silicon ingots and wafers for photovoltaic applications, CoStar Realty Information reported.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based manufacturer will open the new plant later this summer at an initial cost of $52 million. Company officials say Solaicx plans to expand operations at the facility by the end of next year.

Solaicx is the second solar energy company to bring its manufacturing operations to Portland in the past six months. Germany-based SolarWorld Group recently selected Hillsboro, Ore., which is just west of the Portland, to construct what officials say is expected to become the nation’s largest solar production facility.

“We looked at the state of Oregon’s generous financial incentives for renewable energy and Portland’s deep base of skilled labor in silicon manufacturing, and decided that the port is an ideal place for our continued growth as a company,” said Jeff Jones, vice president of manufacturing for Solaicx.

Oregon’s selection by Solaicx and SolarWorld is due in part to a series of initiatives by the state to attract the clean energy sector through incentives and tax credits.

NEW ORLEANS: Maxine Cassin, a prominent local poet, thought her homeowners insurance would more than cover the $100,000 of hurricane damage on her Uptown house here, she said. But two years after Hurricane Katrina, Cassin and her husband, Joseph, are still stranded far from home; their insurer has offered them just $41,000.

Emile Labat 3rd, a funeral home owner and real estate investor, thought his $300,000 homeowners policy, plus U.S. flood insurance, would repay him for repairing his house on Elysian Fields Avenue. But now Labat feels deceived: many of his losses were not covered, and he was stunned to learn that the fine print in his policy called for a sliding deductible that totaled $16,000.

June Rees, a retired nursing professor, gave up on living in New Orleans and reluctantly moved 75 miles, or 120 kilometers, away to avoid skyrocketing insurance costs in New Orleans. The price of her homeowners and flood insurance was going to quadruple, to $8,000 a year, and it still would not have covered wind or hail damage.

“Ive just been ripped out of” New Orleans, Rees said, “as if somebody tore me away from everything Im grounded to.”

Insurance companies may have paid out $11 billion to Louisianians in the two years since Hurricane Katrina, but they have also become a new villain in the tales people tell about the slow recovery here. Every neighborhood is full of horror stories about insurance companies that reneged on their promises, offered only pennies on the dollar in settlements, dribbled out payments, low-balled the costs of repairs, dropped long-time customers and sharply increased the price of coverage.

And it is not just talk. Traditionally, relatively few customers sue their insurance companies, but about 6,600 insurance-related lawsuits have landed in the U.S. district court here - 3,700 of them are still pending. Few have gone to trial. Some homeowners have settled, while other cases have been dismissed or sent to state courts, which are also handling thousands of cases.

Thousands of formal complaints have been filed with the Louisiana Department of Insurance, 4,700 of them in 2006 alone. That is just a tiny fraction of the number of people who feel aggrieved, regulators say. For half a year after the storm, calls to the department reached 20,000 a month.

Louisiana has estimated that, on average, homeowners have received $5,700 less than the state believed they should have after the storm, leading to an extra $900 million of losses for 160,000 families that must be covered by the governments rebuilding program, the Road Home. Even that program is not paying enough to leave homeowners whole.

Insurance companies say the $11 billion they have paid for damage to houses in Louisiana is unprecedented. But they have refused to pay for damage they contend was caused by flooding - which is generally not covered by homeowners insurance - even though many people here believe much of that damage was caused by hurricane wind, which usually is covered.

Several lawsuits here and in Mississippi allege that insurance companies deliberately overstated flood damage so taxpayers would pick up the tab through the U.S. flood insurance program, which has paid out $13 billion in Louisiana. These contentions have prompted several government investigations.

In other cases, customers are arguing that the companies used deceptive business practices, leaning on engineers and insurance adjusters and deliberately underestimated the costs of repairs.

Industry spokesmen have said that most homeowners are satisfied and that 99 percent of homeowners claims have been settled. Any problems stem from the unprecedented magnitude of the disaster, they contend, or from homeowners failure to buy adequate insurance or to read their policies carefully. Rising rates, they say, reflect a more realistic sense of the risk that homeowners assume by living in dangerous coastal areas.

“The insurers did an admirable job under very difficult, unique and extreme circumstances,” said Robert Hartwig, the president and chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York. “The vast majority of homeowners affected by Katrina are happy and pleased with the settlements they received from their insurers.”

Byron McDonald is not one of them. He admits that by neighborhood standards he may have spent too much money - $350,000 - to build his two-story brick house in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, which was finished in 2000. But McDonald, 61, said he wanted a place he could live in until he died, so he was not worried about the resale value.