Borsook David, Becerra Lino, Hargreaves Richard
Imaging Center for Drug Development (ICD), Mclean Hospital, Department of Psychiatry, USA.
Nat Rev Drug Discov. 2006 May;5(5):411-24. doi: 10.1038/nrd2027.
Drug development today needs to balance agility, speed and risk in defining the probability of success for molecules, mechanisms and therapeutic concepts. New techniques in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) promise to be part of a sequence that could transform drug development for disorders of the central nervous system (CNS) by examining brain systems and their functional activation dynamically. The brain is complex and multiple transmitters and intersecting brain circuits are implicated in many CNS disorders. CNS therapeutics are designed against specific CNS targets, many of which are unprecedented. The challenge is to reveal the functional consequences of these interactions to assess therapeutic potential. fMRI can help optimize CNS drug discovery by providing a key metric that can increase confidence in early decision-making, thereby improving success rates and reducing risk, development times and costs of drug development.
如今的药物研发需要在确定分子、作用机制和治疗理念的成功概率时，平衡灵活性、速度和风险。功能磁共振成像（fMRI）的新技术有望成为一系列技术的一部分，通过动态检查脑系统及其功能激活情况，改变中枢神经系统（CNS）疾病的药物研发。大脑非常复杂，多种神经递质和相互交叉的脑回路与许多中枢神经系统疾病有关。中枢神经系统治疗药物是针对特定的中枢神经系统靶点设计的，其中许多靶点是前所未有的。挑战在于揭示这些相互作用的功能后果，以评估治疗潜力。功能磁共振成像可以通过提供一个关键指标来帮助优化中枢神经系统药物研发，该指标可以增强早期决策的信心，从而提高成功率，降低药物研发的风险、开发时间和成本。
