Penn Medicine gets $8M grant to study brains of people in opioid addiction
The five-year grant will fund studies using neuroimaging to study how the brain is affected by opioid use disorders.
Using a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Penn Medicine will create what it says is a first-of-its-kind center to study opioid use disorders with neuroimaging.
The Penn PET Addiction Center of Excellence (PACE) will pair researchers from psychiatry and radiology, who will use positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to study the brains of people suffering from addiction. Penn researchers will also work with scientists from Yale University.
The project will be funded by a five-year, $8.9 million grant. The goal will be to identify neurobiological changes associated with addiction and find treatment targets. Researchers will look at how opioid receptors affect opioid sensitivity, addiction, and suicide along with other brain responses to opioids.
The co-principal investigators at the new center are Henry Kranzler, a psychiatrist who directs Penn’s Center for Studies of Addiction, and Robert H. Mach, a professor of radiology and director of Penn’s PET radiochemistry program. Yale’s part of the project will be led by Richard Carson, a professor of biomedical engineering and radiology and biomedical imaging.