Neuropsychiatric Drug Discovery

If drug discovery is a historically risky business, the search for new and effective neuropsychiatric drugs borders on staking billions of R&D dollars on Powerball tickets. Virtually all medications for treating neuropsychiatric disorders have come to light by chance observation. Only with the discovery of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in the 1980s has CNS drug R&D been nudged out of the pharmaceutical dark ages into a more rational pursuit of new therapies. Barely. Advances in the field remain depressingly few and far between.

As a result, the industry is littered with biotechs and Big Pharma programs that have only costly failures to show...