The symposium will highlight two teams of researchers, focusing on how highly collaborative interactions between medicinal chemists and behavioral pharmacologists facilitate the development and investigation of novel therapeutics. Each team will describe findings ranging from chemical design and synthesis to in vivo evaluation, with one team focused on positive allosteric modulators of α2/3 containing GABA A receptors, and the other focused on mitragynine and related analogs as a novel class of mu-opioid receptor agonists. These teams will demonstrate how scientists from these different fields communicate and educate each other, emphasizing the challenges and successes of these important scientific relationships.