Drug Discovery Centers

National Institute of Mental Health Psychoactive Drug Screening Program

Therapeutic Approaches: Small Molecules, on, on, on, on, Peptides, Peptides, on, Peptides, Peptides, on, on, Peptides, Peptides, on, Peptides, Peptides, on, on, on, Peptides, Peptides, on, Peptides, Peptides, on, on, Peptides, Peptides, on, Peptides, Peptides

Therapeutic Areas of Expertise: Cardiology, Metabolic Disorders, Neurological Disorders, Psychiatric Disorders, Pain, Autism-related disorders, imprinted disorders

Center/Program Highlights:

The NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program (NIMH-PDSP) provides a free screening service to qualified investigators. We provides screening of novel psychoactive compounds for pharmacological and functional activity at a large number cloned human or rodent CNS receptors, ion channels (including hERG), and transporters (including MDR-1). The NIMH PDSP will soon have the capacity to screen essentially all of the druggable non-olfactory GPCRs in the genome. Recent successes include: --The discovery that topoisomerase inhibitors unsilence a gene implicated in Angelman Syndrome (Huang et al, Nature 2012). --Crystal structure validation of kappa and ORL-1 opioid receptors (Wu et al, Nature 2012; Thompson et al, Nature 2012) --Discovery of b-arrestin biased dopamine D2 agonsts as potential novel therapeutics for schizophrenia-related disorders (Allen et al, PNAS 2011)

Sources of Funding: Federal/State, Philanthropy