Neuropsychopharmacology at the new millennium: new industry directions

Rapid advances in modern gene seeking techniques and the sequence data evolving from related genome research should provide both new targets for drug discovery and new insights into risk factors for many neurological and psychiatric disorders. Coupled with the high speed synthetic capabilities available in many companies, high-throughput screening is identifying potential novel drug candidates at extraordinary rates. This enables the drug discoverer to be more precise in the biological specificity of drugs taken to human trials thereby reducing the potential side-effect profile of clinical candidates. The ability to create large libraries of compounds also allows researchers to focus on metabolism and pharmacokinetics at an earlier stage in the drug development process to minimize drug-drug interactions via common sites of metabolism and optimize duration of action for particular indications. An emerging bottleneck in psychopharmacological drug discovery is the relative paucity of preclinical behavioral models predictive of clinical efficacy and the need to carry out early clinical trials to demonstrate therapeutic utility. However, through the use of recently developed chip technology, coupled with data bases of information about single nucleotide polymorphisms in potential candidate genes or risk factors for psychiatric disorders, it should be possible in the near future to stratify clinical populations genetically for inclusion in specific drug treatment trials. The ultimate goal of this research is to obtain homogeneous populations for trials and to predict risk before the phenotype of the disorder is manifest.