JAX gets $11.7M for new center to understand addiction
Photo / Marie Chao
Elissa Chesler, associate professor at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, is the principal investigator for an $11.7 million federal grant to fund a new Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction at JAX.
With drug abuse a prominent and growing problem in Maine, the timing of an $11.7 million federal grant to The Jackson Laboratory couldn’t come at a better time.
The Bar Harbor laboratory will receive $11,714,623 over five years from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health to fund a new Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction at JAX.
“Drug addiction is a devastating and highly complex neurobiological and behavioral phenomenon, with multiple risk factors, stages and behaviors that have proven difficult to study in combination. Our center brings an unprecedented approach to understanding the biological mechanisms behind individual risk for addiction,” JAX associate professor Elissa Chesler, the principal investigator on the grant, said in a prepared statement.
The center will combine the expertise and effort of behavioral neuroscientists from several major universities, computational biologists and geneticists and take advantage of recent advances in precise genetic, genomic and behavioral analysis in the laboratory mouse, according to JAX.
“Despite extensive evidence that addiction is a disease with variable individual risk,” Chesler said, “there is still a widespread misconception that addiction is a moral failing that is completely under the control of the individual. We want to identify the ways in which some individuals are more likely than others to start using drugs or become addicted to drugs, and to better understand how the brain responds to drugs to explain and treat compulsive drug-seeking.”
She added that ultimately, the goal is to find new ways to prevent addiction in people who are at risk and intervene in those who are already addicted.
The research will use cutting-edge behavioral and diagnostic tools, including those in the future JAX Center for Biometric Analysis. The focus initially will be on populations of mice with broadly varied characteristics to search for traits that predispose individuals to addiction and eventually to apply that knowledge to humans.
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