The brain is complex and multiple brain circuits and transmitters are involved in many common CNS disorders. CNS therapeutics have been designed against specific targets in the CNS and the challenge is to reveal consequences of these interactions and assess therapeutic potential. fMRI can report on the functional neuroanatomy of the brain and in combination with targeted therapeutic agents provide novel insights into CNS neuropharmacology that can inform the drug development process from preclinical stages to clinical evaluation. fMRI can help focus CNS drug discovery to improve early decision making, success rates, and development times while decreasing the risks and costs of drug development. The path of traditional outcomes based drug discovery and development can be long, expensive, and uncertain. Early knowledge that speeds decision making around candidate molecules and therapeutic concepts will facilitate the development process by ensuring that if we are to fail we fail fast enabling resources to be focused on more promising molecules or alternative hypotheses. This is becoming increasingly important as there are burgeoning numbers of molecules to choose between and no shortage of potential therapeutic targets that are being revealed by genomics in health and disease. Functional imaging may provide insights into drug efficacy, at anatomical, functional and chemical levels for new drug evaluations. In addition fMRI may define drug side effects and drug dosing for CNS targeted analgesics.

relevant p.a.i.n. group publications

relevant non-pubmed p.a.i.n. group publications