We recently heard that Pfizer is leaving the neuroscience therapeutic area, with a resulting loss of around 300 jobs. This is of course bad news for the scientists involved but I hope the work that was undertaken within Pfizer does not disappear. Chemical probes are critical tools in target identification and validation and arguably even more so in neuroscience. I hope that Pfizer consider releasing some of the well characterised molecules as freely accessible chemical probes, especially if they could also offer a similar but inactive molecule as a negative control. Many of the older tool compounds reported in the literature have been shown to have inadequate selectivity which compromises understanding the biology.

There are many important therapeutic targets within neuroscience but our biological understanding is currently inadequate to justify the investment in drug discovery, a selection of well characterised probes may provide the tools to support the necessary basic biological research.