Neuropsychopharmacology at the new millennium: New industry directions

Rapid advances in modern gene seeking techniques and the sequence data evol ving from related genome research should provide both new targets for drug discovery and new insights into risk factors for many neurological and psyc hiatric disorders. Coupled with the high speed synthetic capabilities avail able in many companies, high-throughput screening is identifying potential novel drug candidates at extraordinary rates. This enables the drug discove rer to be more precise in the biological specificity of drugs taken to huma n trials thereby reducing the potential side-effect profile of clinical can didates. The ability to create large libraries of compounds also allows res earchers 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 indicat ions. An emerging bottleneck in psychopharmacological drug discovery is the relative paucity of preclinical behavioral models predictive of clinical e fficacy and the need to carry out early clinical trials to demonstrate ther apeutic utility. However, through the use of recently developed chip techno logy, coupled with data bases of information about single nucleotide polymo rphisms in potential candidate genes or risk fact ors for psychiatric disor ders, it should be possible in the near future to stratify clinical populat ions genetically for inclusion in specific drug treatment trials. The ultim ate goal of this research is to obtain homogeneous populations for trials a nd to predict risk before the phenotype of the disorder is manifest. [Neuro psychopharmacology 20:99-105, 1999] (C) 1998 American College of Neuropsych opharmacology. Published by Elsevier Science Inc.