Positron Emission Tomography for the Discovery of New Drugs in Psychiatry.

The arsenal of drugs for psychiatry has been difficult to renew for several decades. Many failures in therapeutic trials can be explained by poorly evaluated pharmacological properties, in terms of brain passage, target binding, and functional modulation. Positron emission tomography can provide pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic data that will help to better select candidate molecules for larger-scale clinical trials.