Pubdate: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 Source: Star-Ledger (NJ) Copyright: 2002 Newark Morning Ledger Co Contact: http://www.nj.com/starledger/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/424 SCIENTIST LEADS THE CHARGE IN LEARNING HOW DRUGS AFFECT THE BRAIN As a 10-year-old, Francis Vocci was struck by the story of indigenous South Americans who used the skins of poison frogs to advantage, rubbing their blowgun darts on frog backs before hunting. When hit, even the largest of animals, he read with amazement, were killed or immobilized by a smidgen of poison. Now 53, Vocci is one of the country's leading experts in neuropharmacology, the study of how drugs affect the brain. And he is out to harness nature's chemical bonanza, for the best of reasons: to fell the specter of addiction in America. Over the past decade, developing drugs to treat drug addiction has become a major research focus at the National Institute of Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., where Vocci guides the pharmacological onslaught against addiction from a fourth-floor corner office. There are now more than 60 experimental compounds in the institute's research pipeline. When Vocci joined the agency in 1989, there were zero. He had been working at the Food and Drug Administration then, screening drugs that affect the central nervous system, when he was wooed away to join the institute and head its medications division. He started with $10 million and 10 people. Now the division has 40 staffers and oversees about $100 million in grants to researchers both within the agency and at universities and research centers across the country. From the beginning, Vocci had his work cut out for him. The pharmaceutical industry shunned addiction drugs, fearful that the stigma of drug addiction would taint the reputation of its best- selling products, though some were likely "dual-use" candidates. The drug companies also were concerned about using addicts in experimental clinical trials. Addicts might not take their medicines reliably and might not show up consistently, company executives worried. They might develop nasty side effects that would slow the acceptance of the drug by federal authorities. Vocci got creative. To entice the manufacturers to investigate addiction drugs, he promised them that their trade secrets would stay secret. To executives he offered access to the government's vast array of medication-screening capabilities and clinical beds. He extracted a promise from his colleagues at the FDA to give special attention to medications for drug addiction. He modeled the division after the National Cancer Institute, where scientists in the 1970s reached out to industry and created a phalanx of clinical trial centers to encourage the creation of new cancer treatments and to encourage their adoption across the country. "I had one guy from the South tell me -- and I had never heard this expression before -- 'You are in high cotton.' It means you really can't see very far and you are going to get lost quickly," he remembered. The "disbelieving" pharmaceutical industry, he said, wished his agency luck: "They felt we were really in a maze and that we were really going to have a difficult time." Vocci and others, like the outspoken NIDA chief at the time, Alan Leshner, argued that there was enough science to go on. "Initially, people thought I was being ridiculous when I raised the possibility that addiction was a brain disease, and that includes people who approached the issue from a moralistic point of view and even some in the drug addiction treatment community who focused solely on personal responsibility," said Leshner, now chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington, D.C. "I have to say that, over time, science won out." Vocci agreed that the fact that the science has "ripened" has helped his cause. "What was said then, no one would say now," Vocci said. "We really do have molecular targets in the brain that we can address in a systematic way to develop medications. I have put this forth to multiple pharmaceutical industry people and no one has said, 'You're wrong.' They've all said, 'Agreed.' That's a major change." With every new story of a celebrity telling all about his addiction, Vocci said, addiction becomes a little less stigmatized. "It's not so much an us-vs.-them problem anymore," he said. Small biotechs still lead the field in terms of private addiction research, he said. Though still hush-hush, several major pharmaceutical companies are investigating drugs to treat addiction, he said. "I sat down with my boss one day and said a paradigm shift will have occurred when companies come to see us rather than us seeing them," Vocci said. "And that has happened." - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom