No one will debate the addictiveness of cocaine, but former Boston University professor Christopher Pierce has a slightly different type of addiction ‘-‘- a 20-year fascination with the study of the drug.
‘I got involved in research when I was an undergrad,’ Pierce, now a University of Pennsylvania professor, said. ‘It’s this chemical dopamine in the brain. It seemed like dopamine was involved in all these interesting things: schizophrenia, drug addiction. I became really interested in it and became a lab rat, and I’ve been doing it ever since.’
During his tenure at BU, Pierce conducted an award-winning model of cocaine addiction using rats. Researchers trained the rats to self-administer cocaine by pressing a lever for three weeks. Once that period was over, Pierce and his colleagues replaced the cocaine with saline.
The trials were intended to addict the rats to cocaine and see how they respond to cravings, he said.
‘There are three things that cause relapse: a stressful event, paraphernalia, like a crack pipe or re-exposure to the drug itself,’ Pierce said. ‘We can model all this in the rats. We can stress them out or provide them with the cues [to induce relapse].’
More than two million people are afflicted by cocaine addiction and there is no effective treatment, but Pierce said his research team has been able to ‘almost eliminate the craving’ by inhibiting the flow of calcium channels in the brain with a drug called Diltiazem, which inhibits a link between dopamine and glutamate, the chemicals that cause craving in cocaine addiction.’
‘It’s one of the more significant things we’ve done,’ Pierce said. ‘We think that we’ve pushed the science forward and made some interesting scientific discoveries, but also that it’ll have a direct clinical application within a few years.’
However, Pierce and his team face many challenges before the addiction treatment can reach clinical application, BU professor Kathleen Kantak, one of Pierce’s colleagues, said.
‘To find a way to specifically undo the cocaine-related memory [for addiction] would be important,’ she said. ‘One drawback with the way Chris has it is, is this going to interfere with normal memory?’
Clinical trials using human subjects, which Pierce said he hopes to begin, will answer this question.
The Society for Neuroscience awarded Pierce and his team the $25,000 Jacob P. Waletzky Award on Nov. 14, for their work.
Pierce’s ‘work breaks new ground in neuroscience and drug addiction and provides concrete examples of addiction therapies that can be tested clinically’ according to an SfN press release.
While developing a chemical response to cocaine addiction is crucial to treatment, a social support system is equally important, Massachusetts Organization for Addiction Recovery Executive Director Maryanne Frangules said.
‘We support research and medication assistance,’ she said. ‘We also encourage that counseling be part of any supportive structure and any medication use, so it’s great that this professor [Pierce] is doing research on this.’