Pharmaceutical industry screening for new antiepileptic drugs

It is clear that in coming years, many interesting new compounds will emerge from these and other strategies for drug discovery. In previous strategies of anticonvulsant discovery, whole-animal models of seizures were utilized from the initial stages; however, with the newer strategies, it will become necessary to select promising drug targets for clinical trials in epilepsy that have well-defined molecular targets of action but poorly defined actions in various animal seizure models. The new pharmaceutical discovery technologies of mass screening, cloned drug targets, and combinatorial chemistry will assist in the efficient discovery of novel drug candidates. Incidentally, these techniques also will minimize the use of large numbers of living laboratory animals for anticonvulsant drug screening.