The drug development process in psychiatry faces significant challenges due to low reproducibility rates in animal testing, which often leads to translation failures. To address this issue, we introduce a new approach in psychiatric drug development: a preclinical randomized controlled trial (preRCT). To demonstrate its potential utility, we conducted a multi-center preRCT using the alcohol deprivation effect (ADE) model to assess the impact of ketamine and R-ketamine on alcohol relapse …