Phenotypic approaches for CNS drugs

Discovering new drugs to treat central nervous system (CNS) disease involves establishing high-throughput screening (HTS) formats for central phenotypes such as neuroinflammation, oxidative stress, pathological proteins, hyperexcitability, and neuroplasticity.

A range of complex and patient-based models exist to discover new drugs for these phenotypes; however, certain trade-offs between clinical relevance and scalability need to be carefully considered.

While most CNS drug discovery studies have employed chemogenomic based compound libraries, new fragment-based approaches are emerging that offer distinct advantages.

The design of the screening cascade for hit-to-lead studies is often key to the success of CNS phenotypic drug discovery, with experimental and artificial intelligence (AI) target identification approaches now playing an important role in this process.

https://www.cell.com/trends/pharmacological-sciences/fulltext/S0165-6147(24)00188-3

https://sciencemission.com/Phenotypic-approaches-for-CNS-drugs