Biomarkers and Drug Candidates for the Treatment of Neuroinflammation

Dear Colleagues,

 Recent discoveries suggest that beside the traditional neuroinflammatory disorders, such as multiple sclerosis, neuroinflammation has an important contribution to the development and outcome of several other neurologic conditions and psychiatric disorders. However, the interplay between the immune system and the central nervous system (CNS) is very complex, allowing both adaptive and pathological immunological processes, and thus identifying therapeutic targets are challenging and conditional on better understanding of neuroinflammatory disease mechanisms. Potential drug candidates may act through low-grade peripheral inflammation and the peripheral cytokines, which processes finetune behaviour and can contribute to the emergence of mood disorders or cognitive decline. The blood-brain-barrier is also able to respond to peripheral inflammation by allowing transmission of immune cells and also autoantibodies against specific neuronal molecules into the brain providing several novel molecular targets that may reduce the leakiness off the blood-brain-barrier and thus constitute as treatment option for neuropsychiatric disorders, such as cognitive decline. Furthermore, CNS inflammatory processes, such as microglia activation and local cytokine production are emerging in several disorders either as a causative mechanism (e.g depression) or as a necessary process of healing (e.g. stroke), warranting studies to identify disease related biological pathways with druggable molecular targets.  

To summarise the above, accumulating evidence suggests that specific subgroups of neurological and psychiatric patients suffer from symptoms originating from neuroinflammation, however, the selection of treatment targets and patients who might benefit from these drugs are hindered by the lack of biomarkers that can indicate inflammatory mechanisms or phenotypes.  

This Special Issue embracing research focusing on neuroinflammation and related biomarkers in order to identify drug candidates in the service of better understanding and treating neuropsychiatric disorders and aims to provide readers with the most recent advances in this field. Authors are invited to submit relevant original articles, reviews or short communications for inclusion.

Dr. Gabriella Juhasz
Dr. Xenia Gonda
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Biomedicines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• neuroinflammation
• microglia
• cytokines
• blood-brain barrier
• stress
• genetic pathway
• microbiome
• gene-environment interaction
• neuropsychiatric disorders