Anxious? Check your mGluRs

Glutamate is one of the most important - and most common - neurotransmitters. Too little or too much is implicated in a variety of CNS disorders, ranging from anxiety and schizophrenia to Parkinson's disease (PD). Early attempts to develop glutamate modulators failed because their broad effects throughout the brain caused side effects. As a result, very few compounds made it out of preclinical studies.

Addex Pharmaceuticals SA, which recently raised CHF50.5 million ($39 million) in Europe's all-time largest series B round, is among a growing group of companies that think they can avoid these problems via allosteric metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR) modulators(see BioCentury, May 17). ...