Imaging in CNS Drug Discovery and Development, 2009 Implications for Disease and Therapy

Drug development today needs to balance agility, speed, and risk in defining probability of success for molecules, mechanisms, and therapeutic concepts. New techniques such as fMRI promise to be part of a sequence that could transform drug development. Although numerous review articles exist that discuss the use of imaging in drug development, no one source is available that combines the various techniques and includes a discussion of disease mapping.

Imaging in CNS Drug Discovery and Development, Implications for Disease and Therapy will serve to distill the most salient developments in the use of imaging in drug development and disease mapping. It will launch evolving concepts that integrate new imaging technologies and paradigms with molecular medicine and molecular profiling ("monics") as well as consider the ethical issues that arise as a result of disease or state diagnosis and the use of imaging in the public eye.

David Borsook, MD, Ph.D., trained in medicine and neurobiology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Medical School, Johannesburg, South Africa. He graduated in 1980. Following his internship he trained in Neurology at Boston City Hospital and then was the first Pain Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Department of Neurology. He subsequently was the Director of the Pain Center at the Hospital from 1994 – 2004. He has completed doctoral studies in Neurobiology and later started the Pain Imaging Program in the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2002 he led an effort to cofound a Biotech – Descartes Therapeutics Inc, with his colleague Lino Becerra Ph.D. to use imaging in drug development, where he was Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer. He currently directs an integrated imaging program – Pain & Analgesia Imaging Neuroscience (p.a.i.n.) Group at three Harvard Medical School Affiliated Hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital and Children’s Hospital Boston. A component of this is a consortium of pharmaceutical and academic centers involved in the evaluation of fMRI in drug development known as ICD (Imaging Consortium for Drug Development). He has participated in a number of NIH meetings on future directions of pain research. His research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Foundations and Pharamaceutical Companies interested in the use of imaging in defining pain phenotype. He has published over 85 papers that include various aspects of pain, imaging in pain and analgesia. He is married with sons living in Concord Massachusetts.

Dr. Lino Becerra Ph.D., is Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, he has co-appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry at McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and Radiology at MGH. He’s the Director of the Imaging and Analysis Group at theBrain Imaging Cent