Pubdate: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 Source: Oregonian, The (Portland, OR) http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news/1158377109216120.xml?oregonian?lctop&coll=7 Copyright: 2006 The Oregonian Contact: http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/324 Author: Andy Dworkin Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment) OHSU PITS SCIENCE VS. SCOURGE Meth - The university wins a $5 million federal grant to run a lab that studies the drug and combats its power Saturday, September 16, 2006ANDY DWORKIN Oregon Health & Science University is running meth labs -- ones, however, the U.S. government is glad to support. The school this month won a National Institutes of Health grant to form a new Methamphetamine Abuse Research Center, exploring everything from which genes spur meth use and addiction to whether prescription drugs can help users kick the habit. The school should get about $5 million over five years, supporting about 20 scientists at OHSU and the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a partner in the project. Part of the money will pay for statewide outreach programs that aim to stop children from trying methamphetamine, and to help users find treatment and possibly join human trials. Oregon is an apt home for a meth abuse research center. Several OHSU scientists already study the drug, and Oregon has many meth users who could enroll in studies, said Aaron Janowsky, the OHSU psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience professor leading the center. "In Oregon, we get more methamphetamine-related admissions than cocaine admissions" to the hospital, Janowsky said. That was once a very unusual situation, though he suspects it's growing more common in other states. Although meth use has spread across the country, the NIH has funded few meth centers, Janowsky said. And none of the other centers will feature the same mix of studies that OHSU proposed, extending from basic-science studies of animals to treatment trials on meth-using Oregonians. The "center" grant is enough to fund several labs, which will cooperate to focus on a set of scientific problems in similar ways. That should help discoveries move from basic experiments to human trials, Janowsky said. For instance, if brain scans show changes in certain parts of meth users' brains, scientists can study those areas more closely in lab mice dosed with the drug. "People are not usually willing to have brain biopsies," making the animal studies important, Janowsky said. If mouse studies turned up a gene linked to meth addiction, scientists could look for drugs that affect that gene's work and try it in human trials, he said. Finding genes linked to meth use, and drugs to break the habit, are two of the center's goals. "There are no currently approved treatments for methamphetamine addiction," Janowsky said. "We hope to have a couple of drugs, if not approved, at least in the pipeline in five years." The center soon hopes to start human trials of at least one drug, the heart medicine carvedilol. It may help both post-traumatic stress disorder and meth addiction, Janowsky said. Meanwhile, animal experiments, such as comparing mice more and less prone to using meth, will hopefully turn up "something that looks really attractive as a gene" within five or six years, said Robert Hitzemann, chairman of OHSU's department of behavioral neuroscience. Other research includes why recovering addicts tend to relapse when stressed -- and how to break that cycle -- and how mothers' meth use affects fetuses and newborns. Several people will study impulsiveness. Role Of Impulse Scientists know that drug users, in general, are more impulsive than non-users. But it's not clear whether impulsiveness makes people more likely to try drugs, more likely to keep using after trying them or whether drug use causes people to get more impulsive, said Suzanne Mitchell, an OHSU behavioral neuroscientist. An animal test showed that impulsive mice were more likely to start using cocaine, she said. Mitchell hopes to do similar experiments with methamphetamine. Education is another key piece of "center" grants, including this one, said William Cameron, an OHSU behavioral neuroscientist. Part of that is professional education, he said. The center will help teach medical students and residents about meth research, for instance, and will host two international conferences on methamphetamine research. Teaching the public about meth and its dangers will also be a key component, Cameron said. The center will work with health and science teachers around Oregon, helping them integrate lessons about brain development and addiction into classes. The center also hopes to start "a Web site for the public, in which we talk about the local resources that are available and the national resources for dealing with meth," Cameron said. The site should running in about a year, he said.