Translational neurosciences will not optimally benefit human beings if drug developments, to meet commercial priorities, demonstrate efficacy but neglect the unique opportunities human clinical studies provide to test drug and disease mechanisms and to explore the conditions required for drug benefits in patient care. Corporate support for error-tainted or exclusively efficacy-focused drug development drains financial and human resources that could otherwise address important scientific and patient-care issues, such as dosing, drug-target interactions, drug-cellular and drug-metabolic dynamics, and so forth. These factors are not only important for investigators’ ultimate successes in demonstrating drug efficacy but also needed to realize the promise of neuroscience as a source of new knowledge and of motivations for investigators to address diseases of the brain and improve benefits to patients. Translational medicine as a whole must encourage neuropsychiatric clinical pharmacology that is scientifically sound and discourage drug development efforts not adequate to ensure certainties about outcomes.
