Discovering a brain target contributing to reward-seeking behavior.
Basic research strives to deliver translatable targets and tools to utilize for the most pressing real world issues. Currently, addiction is a highly prevalent, high risk, and costly problem for people across the world. Addiction researchers are striving to find novel targets to biomedically intervene with drug abuse. Environmental cues associated with drugs of abuse often elicit relapse and reinstatement of substance use, even when the consequences are dire. In this project my collaborators and I identified a brain target contributing to this cue-induced reward-seeking. This project was funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
problem
What are the human issues that motivate addiction researchers?
Substance use disorders are associated with a substantial increase in deaths and illness worldwide over the past decade.
Cues associated with drugs of abuse are a common source of relapse or inability to moderate drug consumption.
Researchers seek to find a specific target in the brain where biomedical intervention can be taken to prevent behavioral patterns that lead to cue-induced relapse of drug use and thus prevent drug associated illness and death.
What information do addiction researchers need to develop possible solutions?
A brain target that is translatable and highly specific.
A brain target that is active during behavioral patterns of reward-seeking.
A brain target whose activity predicts reward-seeking behavior.
Use basic animal research to find a translatable and specific brain target that is activated and predictive of behavioral patterns necessary for substance use disorders.
identify translatable brain target based off of previous human substance use disorder research.
create a behavioral paradigm to mimic cue-induced drug seeking behavior.
observe brain target during learned paradigm.
quantify brain targets ability to predict reward-seeking behavior.
goals
Use behavioral design principles and neuroimaging to examine brain target and behavior at the same time.
perform a literature review to scope out appropriate brain target to test.
use behavioral design principles to design a cue-induced reward-seeking paradigm with clear behavioral measures.
use neuroimaging to examine brain target during behavior of interest.
correlate brain target activity with a behavioral measure of motivation.
approach
results
Observed cue-induced reward-seeking with paradigm while neuroimaging.
90% of subjects learned to associated auditory cues with reward while consistently hooked-up to neuroimaging equipment.
Qualitative observation showed brain target develops and acquires a response to behavioral paradigm as the subject develops and acquires cue-induced reward-seeking.
Brain target was active in majority of subjects during key moments of behavioral paradigm.
Quantitative analysis showed activity of brain-target is correlated with behavioral measure of motivation.
Brain target activity predicted the subjects motivation to seek reward post auditory cue.
benefits
Validated a tool for behavioral researchers to measure brain activity throughout learning and acquisition of behavioral paradigms.
Discovered and validated a brain target for addiction researchers to examine in potential biomedical therapies.
All results were published in the Journal of Neuroscience, https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0013-23.2023, for use of all researchers.
Code and analysis public for all researchers, https://github.com/ally-scott/BrainTarget.