I only know of one researcher looking at pharmacological interventions of stuttering. I don't think there will ever be a drug FDA approved for the treatment of stuttering. The sheer cost of the clinical trials is astronomical and no pharmaceutical company is going to take that cost on for such a small reward. There are lots of people doing incredible work on more clearly defining the disorder of stuttering. Soo Eun Chang is looking at white matter track development in children who stutter, Derek Beal has looked at the specialization process of gray matter, Shelly Jo Kraft is looking at the genetics of stuttering, Julie Anderson is looking at cognitive factors associated with stuttering in children who stutter, Ludo Max has looked at aspects of motor control related to stuttering. They don't involve animals but these researchers are all doing fantastic work. Animal models in stuttering are hard to justify, anyway. Stuttering is a decidedly human specific disorder. To our knowledge we are the only organism that produces speech. Finding an animal analogue for this seems to be a stretch. Take for instance, the mouse paper you talked about. Fascinating research, but the "stuttering" they induced in the mouse population isn't really stuttering. It provides interesting ways to shape future questions, but this research is further removed from stuttering than research on human subjects. There's also been studies of stuttering in zebra finches. (but these were finches taught to sing by a "stuttering" zebra finch, so I don't really understand what they were going after there). I get that pharmacological, genetic and animal research is "sexy." But there are other ways to spend research money. In my opinion this research is more important than pharmacological research. This research helps define the mechanism that underlies stuttering. The pharmacological research then uses these theories to select medications that might be beneficial. There are many reasons why there are still open questions regarding brain activity during stuttering. Not the first of which is stuttering is a disorder of childhood, has a high recovery rate, and brains are plastic, so in order to really know about stuttering we have to look at the brains of 2-5 year olds just starting to stutter. (Any differences we see in adults could either be resulting form stuttering or neoplastic adaptations to stuttering). But children don't tolerate fMRI well. Secondly, we want to know questions that fMRI, PET, fNIRS, MEG, EEG can't yet answer. We can see that people who stutter show different areas of brain activity, but what does this activity reflect? We have to ask small questions in order to know that this activation means this. And I can tell you, having done brain imaging work, interpreting the data is never straight forward. Stuttering is a big, complicated problem to solve. It's a movement disorder that has links to psycholinguistics and executive function. This makes stuttering incredibly difficult to study. For instance, we know that stuttering is a breakdown in the movements for speech. But we don't know if this breakdown lies in the planning of movements or the execution of movements (there's emerging evidence to suggest that it's planning). But even then, we can dive deeper into planning--there's planning (the intended movement) and programming (individual muscle control). Then, is the planning deficit really in the motor system, or is it the result of an error in the linguistic planning process. All of this makes stuttering a fascinating disorder to study, but it's going to be decades before we have a solid understanding of what's going on "under the hood"