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Technology is becoming increasingly intertwined with our lives every year. As technology advances, it offers promising new methods to help detect, manage, and improve the care of major depressive disorder (MDD). Unlike other specialties in medicine, psychiatry has been slow to adopt new technologies. Other areas of medicine, primarily cardiology and oncology, have made use of technological methods to patients' great benefits. In psychiatry, new technological methods can predict which antidepressants will be most effective, provide therapies to patients, and empower patients to manage their own medical records. We offer an overview to new technologies and their applications to psychiatry for novices. Our particular focus is big data, machine learning, mobile applications, and blockchain technology. We summarise the uses of technology as assisting physicians in decision making, facilitating patient-patient interaction, and securely storing and managing health-care data. We suggest possible advantages and challenges to adopting these methods. Continued research and technological innovation is needed to improve the psychiatrist's toolbox and to monitor the adoption and consequences of new technologies.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most commonly diagnosed disorders and represents large societal and individual costs. Despite the clinical significance of MDD, our current treatments often remain inadequate to elicit sufficient response, or ideally, remission. Roughly one-third of depressed patients do not respond at all to first-line antidepressants. In this chapter, we outline some of the novel pathways that have recently been implicated in the pathogenesis of MDD in the hopes of developing novel, more effective treatments. In addition, we overview clinical evidence for numerous pharmaceutical agents within each pathway. We investigate inflammatory pathways, oxidative and nitrosative stress, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, glucose metabolism, bioenergetics, the one-carbon cycle, neurotrophins, the glumatergic system, opioids, and the cholinergic system. In describing each pathway as a novel treatment target, we attempt to emphasize the need for increasingly personalized treatments for the heterogeneous phenotypic presentations of MDD.

INTRODUCTION Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) play an important role in the drug product industry. The most obvious contribution is that the API is the active ingredient that makes a drug product effective and provides the pharmacological activity of any drug product or dosage form.