Neuroimmune Pharmacology, 2nd Edition - A Perspective.

It has been almost nine years since the 1st edition of Neuroimmune Pharmacology was published on May 23rd, 2008. The 2nd edition of Neuroimmune Pharmacology by Ikezu and Gendelman (Editors) with Przedborski, Masliah and Cosentino (Associate Editors) manages to fulfill two separate missions: to provide comprehensive, but highly topical access to a rapidly evolving field and to serve as a standalone reference for scientists and clinicians in need of guidance regarding questions pertinent to neuroimmune pharmacology. Doing a PubMed search on the terms neuroimmune and pharmacology yields 1090 publications, with a first publication by Dougherty and Dafny, published in the Journal of Neuroscience Research in 1988, entitled "Neuroimmune intercommunication, central opioids, and the immune response to bacterial endotoxin." Since 2000, there have been 979 publications using these search terms, with 137 published since the beginning of 2016. The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that this is a burgeoning field that represents the cusp between our understanding of relationships between the immune and nervous systems and how we might treat disease with pharmacologic approaches when normal homeostatic mechanisms go awry.