UCSD School of Medicine Awarded $8 Million to Understand Genetic Foundations of Addiction

The University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has received a hefty grant to study addiction and its genetic basis.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse has approved a five-year, $8 million grant for the school to study the genetics of substance use disorders and ultimately aim to understand why some people are more susceptible to addiction than others.

The knowledge will be instrumental in developing more personalized and effective treatments to address the public health crisis posed by substance use disorders, which affect tens of millions of Americans at an enormous cost to the U.S. economy, the school said in a statement.

The title of the grant, awarded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is “Center for Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics of Substance Use Disorders in Outbred Rats.”

Some people who drink alcohol or try illicit substances become addicted, but most do not, according to principal investigator Abraham Palmer, Ph.D., professor and vice chair for basic research in the School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry.

“That vulnerability is partially genetic,” said Palmer.

“We’re very interested to know: what are the genetic differences between people who develop substance use disorders and those who do not.?”

The center will be using rats, because they display individual differences in drug-seeking behavior much as humans do, and they share many of the same genes that control reward pathways in the brain thought to be important in substance use disorders.

The center will build upon 10 years of NIDA-supported research mapping the relationship between heterogenous-stock rat genotypes and these complex behavioral traits.

“We have an enormous database of both the behavior of the animals and of the genetic characteristics of those animals,” said Palmer.

“And that allows us to look at the relationship between the genotype of an animal and its phenotype to understand which important genetic differences shape certain behaviors.”

Additional principal investigators on the project include Oksana Polesskaya, Ph.D., in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego, Leah Solberg Woods, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University, and Pejman Mohammadi, Ph.D., associate professor at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and the Department of Genome Sciences at University of Washington School of Medicine.