Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Commons^™

Computational Pharmacology: Simulating Circuits Of The Brain For Drug Development, Patrick D. Roberts

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

The pharmaceutical industry is approaching unsustainable research costs to develop new drug therapies for mental disease because of the high failure rate in clinical trials. These failures are due to limitations of pre-clinical studies in animal models that fail to predict the efficacy of new drugs in human subjects. The gap between pre-clinical trials and clinical trials is particularly difficult in complex mental diseases such as schizophrenia because of the complex dynamics of the brain and the multiple chemical pathways that drugs can affect.

However, many biological mechanisms associated with schizophrenia are now understood, and computational power and methods have …