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Neuroscience and genetic approaches to the etiology and treatment of addiction. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Project Description Research Interests Despite our best efforts over the last few decades, currently available treatments for addiction are, at best, modestly effective. Our lab has taken a two pronged approach to address the limited effectiveness of current treatments. To develop more effective pharmacotherapies, we have focused our attention on medications that target the basic neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms that are involved in the development and maintenance of addiction. To determine which individuals are most vulnerable to addiction and to determine which individuals might benefit most from a given treatment, we have focused our attention on genetic factors that might explain individual variation in the same basic neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms that influence the etiology of addiction. One very important aspect to our research is the notion that having well defined phenotypes that are proximal to the underlying biological mechanisms is critical to the success of efforts designed to uncover genetic variation that contributes to these phenotypes. In other words, a rudimentary phenotype like whether a person smokes cigarettes (or not) is unlikely to be useful in a genetic study because of the sheer number of factors that may influence that phenotype. Much of our research to date has focused on refining the phenotype such that a given phenotype will be useful in a genetic study. To date, we have focused on acute responses to alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, publishing papers on pharmacological and genetic factors that influence these phenotypes. While acute responses to cues or the drugs themselves are useful phenotypes, we are currently working to develop phenotypes that are even more proximal to the neurobiology of addiction. Working with the MIND Institute, we have taken our laboratory based phenotypes to a neuroimaging environment and are integrating this approach with our recent efforts at identifying genetic variation that influences gene expression in post-mortem tissue samples taken from brain regions that are critical to the neurobiology of addiction. Thus, the genetic approach should yield valuable information about genetic variation that alters gene expression in critical brain areas. The neuroimaging approach will allow us to examine whether this genetic variation also has an impact in vivo on brain activation in response to a drug or drug-related cues. Eligibility Graduate Research Lab | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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