1 Because of this, governments and pharmaceutical companies have expended many billions of dollars on understanding the underlying causes of mental illnesses, and on

discovering new and more effective treatments for them (Roth and Conn, unpublished report). The budget for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) – the major funding agency for mental health-related research in the US – for the financial year Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 2006 stood at $1.4 billion, as stated on their Web site.2 Despite this heavy investment, no psychiatric medications with greater efficacy than drugs discovered 50 years ago have yet appeared.3,4 Thus, for example, clozapine (which was synthesized nearly 50 years ago4) continues to be the “gold standard” for treating schizophrenia.5,6 The recent sequencing and continued annotation of the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical human genome7 and the tentative identification of a large number of schizophrenia susceptibility genes8 have raised the possibility that molecular biology and its associated technologies will lead to new and improved treatments for schizophrenia and related disorders.9 The assumption underlying this hope is that “we should finally make rapid progress identifying Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical some of the vulnerability genes and thus critical pathways for the pathophysiology of the major mental illnesses…”1 The hypothesis

is that if we can understand the pathophysiological basis of these diseases – based

on their molecular neurobiological underpinning – we will be better able to develop curative therapeutics (or “cure therapeutics”1) for schizophrenia and related disorders. Although this is a highly attractive Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical hypothesis, it is Selleckchem MEK162 founded on a number of assumptions, some of which are falsifiable, others of which are not (at least with the available technology). In this review, this hypothesis and its underlying Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical assumptions will be examined, and suggestions will be put forward as to how molecular biology can (and cannot) provide tests of this hypothesis, as well as possibilities for novel medications for curative therapeutics of schizophrenia and related disorders. Schizophrenia as a molecular disease Currently, at least three overlapping paradigms drive the drug discovery effort for schizophrenia. These include, all firstly, the molecular-genetic hypotheses which hypothesize strong effects of schizophrenia susceptibility genes.8 A corollary of the molecular-genetic hypothesis is the proposal that targeting drugs at these genes might yield novel and more effective treatments for schizophrenia.1,10 Secondly, the neuronal network hypotheses propose strong effects of altered neuronal integration in schizophrenia. The corollary of this hypothesis predicts that drugs which fundamentally reset the tone of networks of neuronal interactions will prove efficacious in treating schizophrenia.