BYU NewsNet - Studies search for connection between addiction and brain

On the 12th floor of the Spencer W. Kimball Tower you won’t find Dr. Frankenstein’s infamous laboratory. But amid the sharp scalpels, dangling wires and Led Zeppelin blaring over the intercom, the BYU neuroscience lab does study the brain in efforts to discover drug and alcohol’s effects on the mind.

“We say we like to study the pleasure center of the brain up here,” said Micah Hansen, a recent neuroscience graduate.

With more than 20 students and faculty who research in the lab, it is common to see rats, mice and even brains in their experiments.

“It’s like Gatorade for the brain,” said Ph.D. candidate David Allison as he used tongs to plop a mouse brain into a beaker full of synthetic cerebral fluid. “What’s amazing to me is that I can slice up a brain and keep it alive for three hours as I study it.”

Researchers like Allison work on the 12th floor of the SWKT’s every week to understand the mechanism of addiction and its effect on the brain.

“If we can understand how the brain’s circuitry changes in association with drug abuse, it could potentially suggest ways to medically counteract the effects of dependency,” said lab director Scott Steffensen in a news release. Steffensen is the principle investigator for the lab, which is primarily funded by grants through the National Institutes of Health.

Recently, their latest discovery — the molecular switch the brain uses to turn opiate addictions, such as heroin, on and off — was published in the academic journal Science.

The paper highlights the naturally occurring brain chemical, BDNF, and how chronic drug users experience an unnaturally high release of the protein.

“When people are chronically addicted, it takes away their agency,” said Hansen, a co-author of the paper. “Understanding how BDNF works will help us know how to bring the brain back to the state it was before it was addicted and give relief to chronic drug users.”

According to the article, the brain has a natural “rewards system” that rewards the body for doing things such as getting out of bed in the morning or doing well on a test. But drugs like heroin mimic the rewards.

“Drugs hijack the natural rewards system of the brain,” Allison said.

According to a news release, researchers injected rats with extra BDNF and found it made the rats act as if they were dependent on opiates they had never received. The false addiction made the rats leave their comfort zones to search for real opiates.

“As we understand how neurons behave under certain types of drugs, it will give us clues into addiction recovery,” he said.

The research was conducted in cooperation with another group of researchers in Canada.

“Good research is a collaborative project,” Allison said.

A research team from the University of Toronto headed up the behavioral data for the paper, while BYU’s lab handled the physiology data, Hansen said.

Allison said he hopes students interested in science take note of BYU’s neuroscience program.

“BYU is a great place to do [neuroscience],” he said. “It’s one of the few schools to have a dedicated undergrad program.”

The paper, which was also co-authored by BYU graduate Christine Walton, has an abstract that can be found on the subscription-based Web site www.sciencemag.org/ while the BYU neuroscience center’s Web site can be found at neuroscience.byu.edu.