Challenges and opportunities for drug discovery in mental disorders

There is an undisputed need for better therapies addressing mental illnesses. However, despite major advances in the understanding of the molecular basis of disorders such as depression, anxiety schizo­phrenia and autism in the past decades, efforts to discover and develop new drugs for neuropsychiatric disorders have remained relatively unsuccessful. The disappointments can be traced to failures in the target identification and target validation effort, as reflected by the poor ability of current cellular and animal models to predict efficacy and side-effects. Here will I discuss how patient-based disease mod­elling can be implemented in the early drug discovery process as a crucial component in addressing current problems.