Research Summary

Addiction to various substances (e.g., drugs, alcohol, and tobacco) and behaviors (e.g., internet and gambling) is a serious public health problem. The use of illegal drugs has been increasing in Japan in recent years. Thus, preventing and solving problems that are related to addiction are important.
Some addictive drugs are also widely used as analgesics and for the treatment of developmental disorders. Some molecules that are involved in the actions of addictive drugs may be shared between analgesia and developmental disorders. The goals of our project are the following :

(1) Developing novel treatments for addiction and prevention. We study action mechanisms of opioids, dopamine, and hallucinogens such as phencyclidine to reveal the onset of addiction using several mouse models and behavioral pharmacological study. In parallel with the basic research, we also develop and verify a scale to addiction severity.

(2) Improving personalized pain treatment. Sensitivity of opioid analgesics is associated with polymorphisms of several genes. Based on the genome information, we develop personalized pain treatment.

(3) disorder (ADHD). In our project, tuberous sclerosis complex 1 and 2 hetero knockout mouse and dopamine transporter knockout mouse are mainly used as models of autism and ADHD, respectively. We are finding novel treatments for autism.
Attaining these goals will make significant contributions to society. We seek to accomplish these goals by studying the actions of addictive drugs using molecular biological, behavioral pharmacological, human genomic, and clinical approaches.