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.