How pharmacogenomics might help addiction treatment

How pharmacogenomics might help addiction treatment 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 Related Articles 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 patients responded to naltrexo

kerry grens
| 2 min read

Register for free to listen to this article
Listen with Speechify
0:00
2:00
Share

By Kerry Grens

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 patients responded to naltrexone.2 "We discovered that people with this allele do much better when randomly assigned to naltrexone than they do when they get placebo," says O'Brien.

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-? receptor have been linked with addiction, and Goldman has shown that one haplotype of the GABA-? receptor was most ...

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of

The Scientist Logo
Receive full access to digital editions of The Scientist, as well as TS Digest, feature stories, more than 35 years of archives, and much more!
Already a member? Login Here

Meet the Author

  • kerry grens

    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.

Published In

Share
3D illustration of a gold lipid nanoparticle with pink nucleic acid inside of it. Purple and teal spikes stick out from the lipid bilayer representing polyethylene glycol.
February 2025, Issue 1

A Nanoparticle Delivery System for Gene Therapy

A reimagined lipid vehicle for nucleic acids could overcome the limitations of current vectors.

View this Issue
Enhancing Therapeutic Antibody Discovery with Cross-Platform Workflows

Enhancing Therapeutic Antibody Discovery with Cross-Platform Workflows

sartorius logo
Considerations for Cell-Based Assays in Immuno-Oncology Research

Considerations for Cell-Based Assays in Immuno-Oncology Research

Lonza
An illustration of animal and tree silhouettes.

From Water Bears to Grizzly Bears: Unusual Animal Models

Taconic Biosciences
Sex Differences in Neurological Research

Sex Differences in Neurological Research

bit.bio logo

Products

Tecan Logo

Tecan introduces Veya: bringing digital, scalable automation to labs worldwide

Explore a Concise Guide to Optimizing Viral Transduction

A Visual Guide to Lentiviral Gene Delivery

Takara Bio
Inventia Life Science

Inventia Life Science Launches RASTRUM™ Allegro to Revolutionize High-Throughput 3D Cell Culture for Drug Discovery and Disease Research

An illustration of differently shaped viruses.

Detecting Novel Viruses Using a Comprehensive Enrichment Panel

Twist Bio