Multi-scale Modeling of Drug Action in the Nervous System

Drug discovery and development in CNS diseases has one of the greatest failure rates of all indications. This is due to poor translation ability of preclinical animal models for diseases like schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, and depression. In addition, treatment of patients in real-life situations is far from perfect, and polypharmacy is attempted without a rational understanding of the interactions of the various drugs with each other and with the brain circuits. A possible alternative is to develop an in silico model of relevant brain circuits using the existing expertise of computational neurosciences to which very specific neuropharmacology processes are added. This chapter illustrates a multi-scale drug action model for CNS diseases. We show various applications of this platform in actual CNS research and development projects.