Schizophrenia risk genes: Implications for future drug development and discovery

Present-day development of improved treatments for schizophrenia is hindered by uncertain models of disease, inter-individual response variability in clinical trials and a paucity of sensitive measures of treatment effects. Findings from genetic research emphasize the potential for schizophrenia risk genes to help develop focused treatments, discover new drug targets and provide markers of clinical subtypes. Advances in genetic technologies also provide novel modes of drug discovery in schizophrenia such as transcriptomics, epigenetics and transgenic animal models. In this review, we discuss proven and proposed ways risk genes can be used to enhance the development and discovery of treatments for schizophrenia and highlight key studies in these approaches.