Molecular Insights into the Mechanism of Antipsychotic Drugs

Dear Colleagues,

We are inviting you all to contribute to this Special Issue.

This is a platform for you all to contribute which we hope would contribute to advance schizophrenia therapeutics.

Despite significant advances, clinical use and effectiveness of antipsychotic medications to treat schizophrenia for over 6 decades, their precise molecular mechanisms of action remain unclear.

This is a platform to present and to discuss the theme of “What Remains to be discovered in schizophrenia therapeutics”. Of course, advancing the understanding of molecular mechanisms of action of antipsychotics remain the key to develop novel psychotropic medications to treat schizophrenia.

Contributions to this special issue may include below themes and we are also happy for your ideas as well:

• Currently what is known about the effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs and related mechanisms
• Antipsychotic drug mechanisms of action modifying the disease outcomes
• What remains to be discovered?
• Descriptions and definitions of terminology:
• Advancing and revising the “schizophrenia”; moving forward
• “Antipsychotic”: what new terminology should be developed, what makes sense and most useful?
• Animal models of antipsychotic drug effects, construct and predictive validity
• Approaches to reduce preclinical to clinical translation failures in antipsychotic drug development
• Antipsychotic medication discovery approaches for known and novel molecular drug targets
• Lessons learned from antipsychotic drug development failures
• Beyond neurotransmitter-receptor dyads: intracellular signaling as antipsychotic targets
• Novel antipsychotic approaches: neural networks instead of neurotransmitters
• Molecular targets for one drug polypharmacy or multiple drug polypharmacy known and emerging molecular targets for positive psychotic symptoms
• Molecular targets for negative psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia
• Molecular targets for cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia
• Molecular targets for improved reward system functioning in schizophrenia
• Molecular underpinnings of treatment resistant schizophrenia
• Molecular targets for disease modification in schizophrenia
• Molecular targets for improved safety and tolerability of antipsychotic agents
• Novel modes of delivery for antipsychotic medications (e.g., subcutaneous, transdermal, intranasal, viral vector-based, etc)
• Hypothesis-free rapid screening of compounds based on animal proxy measures of specific receptor and neural circuitry target effects that are deliberately screened in or screened out
• Tropism of Sars-CoV-2 virus and its potential uses in molecular biology

Prof. Dr. Serdar Murat Dursun
Dr. Massimo Tusconi
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. Biomolecules 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 2700 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.

• psychotropic medications
• antipsychotic drugs
• schizophrenia
• molecular mechanisms