National Institute on Drug Abuse - Intramural Research Program
Featured Paper of the Month – August 2023
Published in Biological Psychiatry by Leslie Ramsey, and Marco Venniro, et al. of the NIDA IRP Neurobiology of Relapse Section.
Using a battery of behavioral tests, we demonstrated that female CD1 mice find social interaction more rewarding compared to female C57BL/6J mice. Our data show that CD1 mice are a better strain for studying female social reward learning.
Dr. Amy Newman is one of the three 2023 Hall of Fame inductees of the Medicinal Chemistry (MEDI) Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Dr. Newman shares this honor with two other scientists, Dr. Donna Huryn from the University of Pittsburgh and Dr. Joel Barrish from RA Ventures. Dr. Newman is the fifth scientist… [Read More]
Reviews To Read – July 2023. Published in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences by lead author Sergi Ferré of the NIDA IRP Integrative Neurobiology Section. It is generally assumed that the reinforcing effects of cannabinoids are related to their capacity to induce striatal dopamine release by targeting cannabinoid receptors in the mesencephalic origin of the dopaminergic… [Read More]
Revealing the structure of pharmacobehavioral space through motion sequencing. Nat Neurosci.
Standard behavioral assays that are used for screening candidate therapeutic drugs, such as the elevated plus maze and forced swim test, yield only one or two dimensions of information. Wiltschko et al. used a machine learning algorithm called MoSeq (for motion sequencing) to analyze 3D video recordings of twenty minutes of open field mouse activity, thereby obtaining a much higher dimensional readout of behavior in response to a wide variety of psychoactive drugs and doses. [Read More]
Featured Paper of the Month – July 2023
Published in The Journal of Medicinal Chemistry by Emma Gogarnoiu, Caleb Vogt and Amy Hauck Newman, et al. of the NIDA IRP Medicinal Chemistry Section.
Cocaine and methamphetamine are highly addictive psychostimulants that continue to challenge the health and well-being of those who develop a psychostimulant use disorder (PSUD). To date, there are no FDA approved medications for the treatment of PSUD and this provides a significant challenge to curb its destructive nature and prevent death by overdose.
Hot Off the Press – June 27, 2023 Published in The Journal of Neuroscience by Javier Rubio and Bruce Hope, et al. of the NIDA IRP Neuronal Ensembles in Drug Addiction Section. The study is a novel approach to study molecular alterations in individual synapses using Flow Cytometry of Synaptoneurosomes (FCS). The FCS approach was… [Read More]
Hot Off the Press – June 22, 2023 A new collaborative study coauthored by investigators from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, NIDA-IRP, and NIDA-HQ showed that fatal overdoses on opioids or psychostimulants are 2-3 times more common in men than in women. This sex difference is far larger than those seen in most health-related behaviors. … [Read More]
The Successor Representation: Its Computational Logic and Neural Substrates. J Neurosci.
In this paper, Gershman presents and builds upon a reinforcement learning algorithm first proposed by Peter Dayan in 1993, called the successor representation, which solves some important problems that previous classes of reinforcement learning algorithms have had. Recent research has supported the idea that humans and other animals use successor representations for learning and decision making under some conditions and has proposed that dopaminergic mechanisms could build successor representations in the brain. [Read More]
Featured Paper of the Month – June 2023
Published in Biological Psychiatry by Marjorie Levinstein and Michael Michaelides, et al. of the NIDA IRP Biobehavioral Imaging and Molecular Neuropsychopharmacology Unit.
In this study, we show that S-ketamine not only binds to and activates MOR, but that this interaction is critical for its abuse liability. Specifically, we show that the opioid receptor antagonist naltrexone blocks brain activation by (S)-ketamine in the nucleus accumbens, a region crucial for reward, and also decreases lever pressing for (S)-ketamine in rats.
Congratulations to our 2023 Outstanding Poster Award winners! They were honored at the 11th annual NIDA Poster Day and Mentoring Awards ceremony on May 11, 2023. Back row, left to right: Sarah Claypool, Qingfang Liu, Samanth Lee, Michelle Tsai, Ana Armenta Vega, Kelsey Shimoda, Noelle Henein, Laura Grasso, and Kareem Woods. Front row, left to right:… [Read More]
