Research

In addition to countless lives, the estimated cost of substance use disorders in the United States is more than $740 billion a year (National Institute on Drug Abuse, Trends & Statistics, 2020). Despite striking progress in our understanding of the neurobiology driving drug seeking and relapse, very few treatments are available for patients attempting to stop using. One obstacle to finding effective therapies is that overlapping brain nuclei process both drugs and natural rewards (Nall et al., 2021), which makes selective interventions for drug seeking difficult. To address this issue, we propose to investigate the neuronal ensembles, or sparse populations of neurons activated synchronously, linked to reward seeking using rodent preclinical models of substance use disorders.