Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access originally published online on September 25, 2009
Schizophrenia Bulletin 2009 35(6):1031-1033; doi:10.1093/schbul/sbp106
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Postmortem Brain Tissue for Drug Discovery in Psychiatric Research
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Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe depression are common and extremely disabling diseases thought to be caused by an interaction of genetic and environmental factors. Medications currently available to treat these diseases produce varying degrees of symptom amelioration in most patients but often cause unwanted side effects. The need for more effective medications with fewer side effects is universally acknowledged.
Many of the medications currently available, such as lithium and chlorpromazine, were discovered through serendipitous observation. However, there are more rational and reliable approaches to drug discovery. One approach is to identify genes and proteins thought to be etiologically involved in the disease and then identify the molecular pathways associated with these genes and proteins. Once putative disease pathways or mechanisms have been identified, chemical and molecular libraries can be screened for effective compounds. This approach may also identify molecular pathways impacted by existing medications used to treat other diseases. This
2 Stanley Brain Research Laboratory, Stanley Medical Research Institute, 9800 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 240-499-1186, fax: 301-251-8602, e-mail: kims@stanleyresearch.org