Central Nervous System Agents in Medicinal Chemistry (Formerly Current Medicinal Chemistry - Central Nervous System Agents) - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2008

Recent studies show that the behavioral changes associated with reward expectation may be underpinned by two different cognitive mechanisms: perceptual sensitivity on the one hand, and response bias on the other. Perceptual sensitivity refers to the quality of decision-making as a function of the ratio between signal and noise. The prospect of reward may improve the signal-to-noise ratio for stimuli with a high reward value. Read More

The amino acid L-glutamate is generally recognized as the major excitatory neurotransmitter of the mammalian central nervous system (CNS) and glutamate receptors play a major role in fast excitatory synaptic transmission. Nmethyl- D-aspartate (NMDA)-type glutamate receptors are widely distributed throughout the CNS and operate ligandactivated ion channels. The activation and function of NMDA receptors are modulated Read More

West syndrome is a severe epilepsy, occurring in infancy, that comprises epileptic seizures known as spasms, in clusters, and a unique EEG pattern, hypsarrhythmia, with psychomotor regression. Maturation of the brain is a crucial component. The onset is within the first year of life, before 12 months of age. Patients are classified as cryptogenic (10 to 20%), when there are no known or diagnosed previous cerebral insults, and Read More

Processing of information by the central nervous system (CNS) depends on the dendritic morphology of postsynaptic neurons. The patterning of dendrites is determined by extrinsic and intrinsic factors that promote the activation of cellular signaling pathways. These factors and signaling cascades may lead to the transcriptional activation of regulators of neuronal morphology. Interestingly, when there is an abnormal decr Read More

Just a few short years ago, elevated homocysteine levels were widely considered to be a risk factor for a plethora of diseases from cardiovascular disorders to neurodegenerative conditions. Because of this there was a boom in research into this amino acid, with over 13 000 scientific papers published on it by January, 2008. It was hoped that simple pharmacological and dietary intervention to lower plasma homocysteine woul Read More

A novel class of therapeutic agents based on nucleic acids has emerged and shown very promising pre-clinical results, named small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs). siRNAs are small RNA duplexes capable of silencing undesired (i.e., mutant, exogenous or aberrant) gene expression with high specificity through a mechanism known as RNA interference. These agents have called special attention to neurosc Read More

For ages, the practice of drug discovery has relied heavily on the one-drug one-target design strategy of medicinal chemistry. However, despite the tremendous advances made in chemical and biological sciences and in the discovery technologies the number of drugs/drug candidates coming out from this one-drug one-target approach is paradoxically dwindling. It is now well recognized that the age old philosophy of medicinal che Read More