Pharmacological magnetic resonance imaging: a new application for functional MRI

Various methods, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), ha ve recently been developed to allow investigators to study functional activ ity in the living brain. Such techniques are now being used to investigate regionally specific brain activity associated with the administration of CN S-active drugs. fMRI in particular is increasingly recognized as being a re latively non-invasive way to perform pharmacological investigations in expe rimental animals, healthy human volunteers, and individuals with CNS diseas e. This use of fMRI, dubbed 'pharmacological MRI' or 'phMRI', holds the pro mise of providing relatively straightforward pharmacodynamic assays and can be used to establish brain-penetrability parameters, or dose-ranging infor mation for novel therapeutic compounds.