Human Genome Project columns published by Dr. Preskorn
Published in Journal of Psychiatric Practice
(formerly the Journal of Practical Psychiatry and Behavioral Health)

Modern drug development and the Human Genome Project

This series of columns is devoted to how drugs are developed and how that will likely change as a result of the Human Genome Project.

• May 2001 -- Antipsychotic Drug Development in the Pre-Human-Genome Era: A Full Circle
  
  
• May 2002 -- The Overlap of DSM-IV Syndromes: Potential Implications for the Practice of Polypsychopharmacology, Psychiatric Drug Development, and the Human Genome Project -- This article addresses some conceptual issues relevant to psychiatric diagnoses as they relate both to drug development and to clinical practice. It also discusses how these issues may be relevant to the human genome project and its search for the genetic basis for specific psychiatric disorders and to the apparently growing tendency to use polypsychopharmacology in clinical psychiatric practice.
  
  
• Nov. 2001 -- Drug Development in Psychiatry and Genomics: From E. Coli to Man - This column continues to illustrate how the knowledge gained from the sequencing of the Escherichia coli (E. coli) genome is likely to affect psychiatric drug development. The column also expands the discussion concerning the greater challenges encountered in developing drugs to treat psychiatric illnesses versus infectious diseases, even while acknowledging the commonality between these two development processes. Understanding these challenges is conceptually important for both the prescribes and the researcher. This knowledge provides a context for understanding the limitations of current psychiatric drug development as well as how the human genome project will likely change this process in the future. This column also illustrates some of the problems inherent in drug discovery in psychiatry and the challenges inherent in testing such drugs.
  
  

• Sep. 2001 -- Drug Development in Psychiatry and the Human Genome Project: The Explosion in Knowledge and Potential Targets - The goal of this series of columns is to explain 1) the process of drug development and its relevance to the optimal practice of clinical psychopharmacology and psychiatry, and 2) the implications of the human genome project for future drug development in psychiatry Results from PubMed searches will be presented illustrating the rapid expansion of biological knowledge and chemical techniques relevant to modern drug development that has occurred over the last 25 years. The column discusses the paradigm of anti-infective drug development and its application to psychiatric drug development.

• Jul. 2001 -- Drug Discovery in Psychiatry: Drilling Down on the Target of Interest -This column illustrates the implications of the human genome project for drug development in psychiatry and complement earlier columns on the evolution of antipsychotics and antidepressants. As pointed out in those columns, the modern era of drug discovery in psychiatry has progressed in epochs. The first epoch began in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was marked by a series of chance observations. The second epoch began in the late 1970s and extended through the early 1990s; it was marked by the use of receptor binding studies and other in vitro techniques to refine structure-activity relationships in order to synthesize compounds with a specific desired neural mechanism or mechanisms, while avoiding other, undesired mechanisms of action. The third epoch started in the early 1990s and has involved the use of techniques derived from molecular biology to discover completely new SOAs for drug development in psychiatry.
  

• Mar. 2001 -- The Human Genome Project and Drug Discovery in Psychiatry: Identifying Novel Targets - This column is the third in a series on the human genome project and its implications for drug discovery for brain diseases, particularly those involving disturbed higher brain functions: cognition, perceptual organization, and personality. This column extends the discussion previously identified in part two in this human genome project series.
  
  
• Dec. 2000 -- Bridging the gap - There are both great opportunities and significant risks in developing novel drugs for central nervous system diseases. The opportunities stem from advances being made in our understanding of the structure and function of the human brain as a result of neuroscience and molecular biology research.

  However, despite advances in CNS drug discovery, precious little is known about the causes of such chronic illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.

  This column identifies some problems encountered in the drug development process and also illustrates how novel approaches, such as bridging studies may be beneficial in addressing these issues.

• Nov. 2000 -- The stages of drug development and the human genome project: drug discovery - This column focuses on the first stage of drug development: Drug discovery.
  
  
• Sep. 2000 -- The human genome project and modern drug development in psychiatry