We are pleased to announce that our recent review of the use and misuse of the drug discrimination test to evaluate the abuse potential of novel centrally-acting drugs has now been published online by the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
The article was written by David Heal, Sharon Smith and Jane Gosden of DevelRx and James Rowlett, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Center for Innovation and Discovery in Addictions, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, Mississippi, USA.
The standard drug discrimination test is used to explore whether the psychoactive effects of a drug-candidate generalize to the discriminative cue of an abused drug that animals have been trained to recognise. It is an essential part of the safety pharmacology package when the pharmacological mode of action of the test drug is known and comparable to or closely-related to a known drug of abuse. Experimental variants of the drug discrimination test have been advocated by regulatory authorities to test CNS drugs acting through novel pharmacological mechanisms. We have critically evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of these variants and conclude that due to the pharmacological-specificity of the drug discrimination model, the models have no scientific rationale or translational validity for predicting the abuse potential of drugs acting on novel CNS targets. The review includes a useful decision tree recommending when and how to use the standard drug discrimination test to evaluate CNS drugs for medical use, based on the pharmacological profile of the drug-candidate. You can read the full article here.
Heal DJ, Smith SL, Gosden J, Rowlett JK. Discriminating evidence – use and misuse of the drug-discrimination test in abuse potential assessment of novel CNS drugs. J Psychopharm, 2025: doi.org/10.1177/02698811251330780.
If you are developing CNS drugs for human use and this is a topic that interests you please get in touch.