Every protein has a cellular receptor, and if researchers can identify the cellular pathways that lead to neural regeneration, they may be able to design small-molecule drugs capable of being delivered to the brain, according to McBurney. Unlike they do for many other disease targets, companies often do not devote drug discovery programs to the creation of therapies for a specific disease. Instead, companies such as Merck assign researchers to work out the mechanisms of neuronal pathways. Such mechanism-based approaches make neuroscience one of the most diverse fields in the life sciences. Researchers enter neuroscience from all sorts of backgrounds, with specialties including neurobiology, electrophysiology, neurochemistry, biochemistry, behavioral pharmacology, and neuropharmacology, to name just a few.
Companies emphasize the importance of a broad-based knowledge.
That emphasis on molecular biology has been a great boon to neuroscience, but it has also created an imbalance. Many academic research programs focus so much on gene expression and molecular studies that they have de-emphasized the whole animal. We look at behavior and then receptor occupancy in the brain as that animal is behaving. We need people who can carry out those experiments. The brain is the organ of behavior, and we have to ultimately test our compounds in behaving animals.