About this Research Topic
The Specialty Chief Editor, Professor Roberto Ciccocioppo, would like to invite critical, ambitious and courageous contributions that can provide new insights and stimulate a constructive debate around the following themes.
The study of psychopharmacology is undergoing a significant transformation. New omics methodologies are generating a vast amount of information, allowing us to identify new targets and molecular mechanisms for the development of innovative drugs and therapies. Integrating pharmacological data with information from omics studies in genetics, epigenetics, and proteomics is an essential step in improving therapy in the field of neuropsychopharmacology. However, the massive amount of collected data requires new and increasingly sophisticated approaches to their analysis. The use of artificial intelligence techniques will be increasingly important for target identification, drug development, and data analysis in general.
Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that psychopathological states and drug response are strongly influenced by a number of factors, such as environment, patients age, sex, concurrent comorbidities. To optimize the therapies and to improve the treatment outcomes it is crucial to consider these variables.
These ambitious challenges contrast with the trend, observed in recent years, of decreasing interest in pharmacological studies in the field of psychiatry. At the academic level, this disaffection towards pharmacological studies is partly due to the emergence of techniques such as optogenetics, chemogenetics, or calcium imaging, which inherently favor neurophysiological or neurocircuit studies. In the industrial field, the progressive decrease in interest can largely be attributed to the high risk of failure and the high costs associated with the development of neuropsychiatric drugs. The renewed interest in the study of psychedelic and dissociative substances is a recent phenomenon that rekindles enthusiasm for the development of psychiatric medications.
This Research Topic aims to host original works, reviews, and opinion papers on topics related to psychopharmacology. Contributions focused on gender differences in the use of AI technologies, preclinical and clinical studies of psychedelic substances and other innovative drugs of interest in psychiatry will be particularly appreciated. Papers analyzing the current and future landscape in the development of new psychiatric therapies will also be welcome.
To acknowledge your efforts and commitment to shaping this discussion, the Specialty Chief Editor will select and award the best article submitted to this collection. The authors of the winning paper from the Editor's Challenge in Psychopharmacology will receive a waiver for the article processing charge on their next submission to Frontiers in Psychiatry.
Keywords: psychopharmacology, omics, artificial intelligence, novel therapies, psychedelics, proteomics, genetics, epigenetics
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.