Drug Addiction Treatment in Galveston Enhanced by Therapeutic

GALVESTON, Texas - July 27, 2018 - PRLog -- A new therapeutic created in Galveston, Texas has been formulated to help reverse the chemical imbalances in the brain and assist people during their drug addiction treatment.

The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB Health) researchers used rats and gauged their reactions before and after the study, published the Journal of Medical Chemistry.

The researchers trained the rats to press down levers at the signal of a light for cocaine and the new therapeutic was experimented on half of the rats while the other half were given saline.

"We have considerable research invested in understanding the functional deficits in the target protein (5-HT2C receptor), and the idea for developing a new medication that could normalize that target with minimal side effects," said Kathryn Cunningham, the director of the UTMB Health Center of Addiction Research and one of the leaders of the study.

Cunningham, who is also a pharmacologist with experience in the neurobiology of addiction, and Dr. Jia Zhou, a medicinal chemist with experience in the drug addiction treatment industry, combined to test some molecules for this research.

"I identified a drug in the literature as a starting point," she said. "And in conversation with my colleague and collaborator Dr. Zhou, we began to establish the technologies and methods to set in motion the study."

https://www.drugaddictionnow.com/2018/07/27/drug-addictio...