Posted by SLS on February 6, 2006, at 20:52:07
In reply to Receptor selectivity as the next step?, posted by Racer on February 6, 2006, at 14:12:14
Stop, Racer, you're making my head spin!
Actually, the problems of how to understand and treat mental illnesses are being attacked from all angles. The problem with trying to isolate a single receptor is that it acts in concert with other receptors within both proximal and distal circuits. Basic neuroscience has been doing exactly what you proposed for quite a few years. Unfortunately, it has not yet yielded the understandings necessary to design drugs with the specificity one would hope to see in a therapeutic modality. Huge amounts of data are being produced and assembled, but the brain is just too enormously complex for these data to render adequate understanding of its workings right now.
The receptor du jour is serotonin 5-HT1b.
- Scott
poster:SLS
thread:606920
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060205/msgs/607037.html