Despite promising new insights and advances, a panel of experts agreed that translating the effects of drugs which impact the brain from the simple cell all the way to human clinical trials remains a complex and daunting challenge.

Dr Frank Yocca, Vice President for AstraZeneca R&D Wilmington CNS Discovery, pointed out that while there have been many advances in scientists' ability to create sophisticated disease models in vitro and in vivo, using those models to predict drug responses in humans (so-called translational models) is an enormous challenge in the CNS area.

“We’re spending a lot of time and effort developing transgenic models, surgical models and pharmacological models, but it’s still very difficult to translate such models into reliable predictors of drug action in man,” Dr Yocca said. "Indeed, unlike treatments for peripherally-related diseases, determining the effective response to new CNS medicines in patients can require long and costly clinical trials."

The panel participants:

• Frank Yocca, Vice President, CNS Research, AstraZeneca
• Jeff Vaught, President, R&D, Cephalon, Inc.
• Orest Hurko, Vice President, Translational Research, Wyeth
• Jim Eberwine, Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Published 12 July 2005