Handbook of Psychopharmacology, Volume 17: Biochemical Studies of CNS Receptors

by Leslie L. Iversen

It is now eight years since the first Handbook volumes on Basic Neuro pharmacology were published, and there have been many important advances. As in many other areas in science, progress in this field has depended to a considerable extent on the availability of new experimental methods, and Volume 15 reviews some major recent developments, including new autoradiographic techniques that allow direct visualization of drug and transmitter receptors in the nervous system, and the pin pointing of the precise locations of the changes in brain metabolism elicited by various drug treatments. Volume 16 and 17 cover two of the most active areas for basic research in psychopharmacology at the moment: the characterization of drug and transmitter receptors in brain by radioligand binding techniques, and studies of the role of small peptides in brain function. The latter area, in particular, illustrates how rapidly progress continues to be made in basic research on the mechanisms of chemical communication within the nervous system. Eight years ago when the Handbook first appeared none of the opioid peptides (enkephalins and endorphins) had yet been identified. Since then a whole new area of basic biological research has focused on these substances, and in addition we know of more than thirty other neuropeptides with putative eNS trans mitter functions."

436 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1983

About the author

Leslie Lars Iversen FRS is a British pharmacologist, known for his work on the neurochemistry of synaptic transmitters

Iversen was Director of the MRC Neurochemical Pharmacology Unit, in Cambridge from 1971 to 1982, then Director of the Merck, Sharp & Dohme Neuroscience Research Centre from 1982 to 1995. He became Visiting Professor of Pharmacology, at the University of Oxford in 1995.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980, and gave the Society's Ferrier Lecture in 1988.