• To study novel proteins to determine whether they or the signaling pathways in which they participate contain potential drug targets for treating alcohol use disorders.
• To investigate whether the genes that encode these proteins are associated with risk of alcoholism in humans.

Source: Wallace Ravven
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A drug already approved for nicotine addiction als curbs alcohol dependence, a new animal study shows. One dose alone cut drinking in half. The finding is particularly encouraging, the researchers say, because the animals did not turn to drinking in excess after the drug was stopped, a common pattern when people take current drugs to curb alcohol consumption.

In addition, the drug did not kill appetite, which the most effective drug to curb alcohol dependence does.

In the study, rats had access to unlimited amounts of alcohol. Under these conditions, they steadily increased their alcohol intake over several months. But the first day they received the drug, they cut their drinking in half. They received the drug every day fro a week, and during this period, maintained their lower level. When the drug was discontinued, they returned to their previous levels - but no higher. Read More

With this question in part one of Addiction: Vice or Disease?, neuroscientist Howard Fields — a senior researcher at the UCSF-affiliated Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center and director of UCSF's Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction — tossed a torch onto the dry grass of behavioral modification. Only time and the success or failure of new anti-addiction drugs will determine if such incendiary remarks will ignite renewed debate or just flame out.

In the meantime, Fields continues to fire away at the status quo.

"Most treatment programs for alcoholics don't use a lot of medication," he says. "They use detoxification and cognitive behavioral transformation, like the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This is fine. Many people are helped, but relapse is very common. What I'd like to see is more clinical research. The biggest hurdle is that not everyone in the medical profession has yet to buy into the fact that addiction is really a disease of the nervous system. It's exciting, of course, that all the science is inevitably going to lead to some new treatments (some of which were mentioned in part two of Addiction: Vice or Disease?). And I think that after one or two truly effective drugs come along, people's attitudes toward alcoholism will change just like they did about depression when antidepressants came out. But," he adds, "what good is a new medication if the treatment community doesn't want to use it?" Read More

The discovery by neuroscientists at UCSF's Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center is being reported February 16 in the journal Neuron.

The research focused on orexin's role in strengthening communication between neurons that release dopamine, a brain chemical central to learning and memory. The strengthened communication is known to play a key role in the experience of a drug high and subsequent drug craving.

Orexin is produced in the brain's lateral hypothalmus (LH) region. The scientists demonstrated in studies of rats that orexin acutely enhances the ability of receptors at dopamine neuron synapses – known as NMDA receptors – to promote the release of dopamine. Read More

18 January 2005

A naturally occurring hallucinogen advocated by some clinicians as a potent anti-addiction drug has been rigorously studied for the first time, confirming its ability to block alcohol craving in rodents, and clarifying how it works in the brain. The new research findings about the drug Ibogaine open the way for development of other drugs to reverse addiction without Ibogaine's side effects, potentially adding to the small arsenal of drugs that effectively combat addiction.

Derived from a West African shrub, Ibogaine has been championed for years by a cadre of clinicians and drug treatment advocates impressed with its ability to reverse withdrawal symptoms and craving for alcohol and various drugs of abuse. It has been used outside of the U.S. to treat addiction by American and other clinicians. But its side effects, including hallucinations, which made it popular in the 1960s drug culture, and evidence of toxicity to certain nerve cells in rodent studies have discouraged careful studies of its clinical potential against drug and alcohol addiction. The FDA has not approved use of Ibogaine in the U.S.

Scientists at UCSF's Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center have now shown definitively in experiments with mice and rats that Ibogaine does reduce alcohol consumption, and they have determined that it does so by increasing the level of a brain protein known as glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor, or GDNF. In a separate study, they demonstrated that GDNF by itself decreases alcohol consumption. Read More