Prospects for the treatment of depression

Abstract

Antidepressant drugs represent the principal form of treatment for major depressive disorder. While there are a plethora of medications available for this task, current drugs have many shortcomings. In the face of these deficiencies there is an ongoing search for new agents. The search has been guided, in part, by drug design based on existing agents and their putative mechanism of action. This has been less than fruitful in addressing inadequacies of existing medications as it has not produced compounds which are novel in terms of pharmacological mechanisms. Recent insights from molecular biological approaches hold promise for the discovery of novel compounds, in particular the so-called ne..