How pharmacogenomics might help addiction treatment

Naltrexone Molecule How pharmacogenomics might help addiction treatment 20 years ago, scientists got hooked on a single transcription factor that responds to a number of drugs of abuse. Will their work lead to treatments? By Kerry Grens ARTICLE EXTRAS 1 In 2003 David Oslin and Charles O'Brien at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Addiction Treatment and their colleagues reported an association between this SNP and how well

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Naltrexone Molecule

20 years ago, scientists got hooked on a single transcription factor that responds to a number of drugs of abuse. Will their work lead to treatments?
By Kerry Grens

ARTICLE EXTRAS

O'Brien would like to include genetic data in addiction trials. "I think we ought to be genotyping patients?in all our clinical trials," he says. There are numerous genes whose polymorphisms might predict a person's risk for addiction and response to therapies, O'Brien adds. David Goldman at NIAAA says that understanding them might also reveal the subtype of addiction a person has. For example, SNPs in the gene coding for the GABA-a receptor have been linked with addiction, and Goldman has shown that one haplotype of the GABA-a receptor was most frequent among alcoholics with high anxiety.3 "We showed that although [this haplotype] is linked to alcoholism, it's through the anxiety dimension of behavior," he says. Goldman contends ...

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Meet the Author

Kerry Grens
Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.
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