The Challenge
Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) or addiction is the fastest-growing health and well-being threat in western society. Every day in the U.S. more than 250 people die of an opioid overdose, and excessive alcohol use kills an additional 300. Abuse of drugs, including illicit/illegal drugs, alcohol and prescription opioid painkillers exacts more than $850 billion annually in costs. Despite these alarming statistics, there has been little effort to develop therapeutics to intervene in SUD. Indeed, the only current therapeutics used to intervene in SUDs either block the rewarding effects of drugs and show poor compliance (e.g. naltrexone for alcoholism) or use a less “dangerous” drug as a substitute (e.g. methadone/buprenorphine for opioid use disorder).
Addiction is a disease of the brain in which cells and circuits are altered from what is neurotypical. Those who have developed an SUD remain at risk for relapse for months/years/decades after they seek treatment, indicating that these drug-induced changes in the brain circuitry continue to lie-in-wait. The CRAVE program’s goal is to make headway in identifying new interventions to treat SUDs, in particular the cycle of craving and relapse, by dialing the drug-changed brain circuits back to a less altered state.
The Vision
The primary vision of the CRAVE program is to motivate a new generation of scientists to study SUDs and provide the training necessary to translate basic science finding towards new treatments for addiction and its comorbidities. While drug development occurs almost exclusively in the for-profit sector, university settings and the Principal Investigator-led research laboratories that form the backbone of the biological and medical sciences curriculum, provide the research training necessary to generate the next generation of scientists committed to therapeutic development for human diseases. This model whereby basic research trains the next generation of drug developers and informs target identification and validation has worked brilliantly for many diseases and disorders.
The mission of CRAVE is to stimulate therapeutic development for SUDs by creating a program that will foster basic research in SUDs, and also provide a mechanism to translate findings into a therapeutic development pipeline. CRAVE will (1) Create a leadership team committed to a milestone-based approach to intervening in SUDs. (2) Support research committed to achieving these milestones via pilot grants. (3) Create/support a behavioral core for running animal models of substance use/abuse and their comorbidities for circuit and target validation and lead molecule testing. Additional long-term goals are to expand the program to (4) Create/support a small molecule discovery/screening laboratory staffed with experts on assay-development and medicinal-chemistry to identify and optimize lead compounds to feed back into the basic research programs and (5) Provide assistance with acquiring seed capital for launching new entrepreneurial start-up ventures with a mission to intervene in substance abuse.
The Launch
The Center for Neuroscience (CNS) committed $150,000 to launch the CRAVE program. These funds will provide postdoctoral fellowship(s) that spearhead new SUD-focused pilot projects in CNS laboratories. The call for pilot projects was in Fall 2023. The abstracts of these proposed projects can be found under “Pilot Proposals.”
Identified funding priorities include:
- Endowed Faculty Chair: a powerful tool to recruit and retain a world-class leader in SUD research ($2,000,000 MIN)
- Postdoctoral Fellowship(s): help recruit new scientists to SUD research and broaden the next generation of scientific leadership ($125,000/YR)
- Pilot Research Grant: supports innovative, high-risk and potentially high-reward projects to catalyze new discoveries ($75,000/YR)
- Community Education Program: promotes awareness and education for the public about SUDs and their comorbidities ($15,000/YR)
- Annual Scientific Research Symposium: showcases substance use disorder research and promotes new interdisciplinary collaborations ($10,000/YR)
- Undergraduate Research Award: provides a stipend for an undergraduate researcher to gain hands-on lab experience in SUDs with faculty mentorship ($7,500/YR)
Support Addiction Research at CNS
To learn how you can support CRAVE, contact Jennifer Scott, Executive Director of Development, at jescott@ucdavis.edu.
