The pharmacological manipulation of interaction of the intracellular signalling pathways mediated by Ca2+ and cAMP (Ca2+/cAMP interaction) may provide new insights for the pharmacotherapy of psychiatric disorders, dramatically impacting clinical pharmacology and translational medicine. Disorders mainly resulting by reduction of serotonin and catecholamine release in central nervous system could be directly impacted by the manipulation of the Ca2+/cAMP interaction, such as depression. Since 1975, several clinical studies have reported that administration of L-type Ca2+ channel blockers (CCBs) produces reduction in vascular resistance and arterial pressure in hypertensive patients, associated with an increase in plasma noradrenaline levels and tachycardia characterized by sympathetic hyperactivity. During almost four decades these enigmatic phenomena remained unclear. In 2013, we discovered that this paradoxical sympathetic hyperactivity produced by CCBs is due to its interference on the Ca2+/cAMP interaction. Then, the pharmacological manipulation of this interaction could be a more efficient therapeutic strategy for increasing serotoninergic and monoaminergic neurotransmission in depression.

The aim of translational research is to discover new targets to develop new therapies. Translational research requires the involvement of two separated scientific areas such as basic and clinical research. Unfortunately, the active collaboration between clinicians and basic scientist do not work very well. Basic scientists are deeply involved in the mechanism of a disease but have a large ignorance of clinical aspects of the disease while clinicians are deeply involved in symptoms and disease progression but with low understand of basic mechanisms of the disease. A more active collaboration between basic and clinician scientists is required to face a disease cure or developing new therapies. Another important problem is the huge increase in the information. The scientific information grows both in amplitude and also in depth that make difficult for scientist to digest all the information, increasing the gap between basic and clinician scientists.