Schizophrenia Develops a Complex

The general strategy for discovering compounds with antipsychotic activity has focused on identifying agonists or antagonists of a specific receptor class. This results in compounds that alleviate only a subset of schizophrenia symptoms without avoiding neurological side effects.

Researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified a serotonin/glutamate receptor complex in rodent brain that unites two pathways previously targeted individually to treat psychosis and other symptoms of schizophrenia.¹ Designing compounds or combination therapies that modulate the function of the complex rather than that of each receptor separately could be a strategy for generating a new class of antipsychotics...