Addictive Substance Project
Identification of Action Mechanisms of Addictive Substances and Its Medical Applications
Kazutaka Ikeda, the head of Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences since 2015, has been the leader of the Addictive Substance Project since 2005. He graduated Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokyo in 1989. After that, he studied under Dr. Kenji Sobue, Dr. Masayoshi Mishina and Dr. Toshiro Kumanishi as a graduate student. He received Doctor of Medical Science in 1995 from Graduate School of Medical Science, Niigata University. He started to work at RIKEN as a researcher under the supervision of Dr. Masao Ito, Dr Ryoji Yano and Dr Hiroaki Niki in 1995. He moved to Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Psychiatry in 2000 and has leaded a project team since 2002. His current interest is to improve treatment, prevention, and understanding of addiction, pain, and developmental disorders through revealing of mechanisms underlying addictive substance effects.
Backgrounds
Addictive drugs, although a cause of drug dependency, which is a serious social problem as well as hallucinations and delusions, are widely used as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of chronic pain and developmental disorders.
This project seeks to elucidate the active mechanisms at work in addictive drugs and promote research that will assist in the medical applications of these results to develop new methods for the prevention and treatment of addiction and other disorders. Additional aims include the improvement of pain management techniques such as customized pain treatments and the development of new methods of treating developmental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorders.
Objectives
- To develop methods of treatment and prevention for addiction and similar disorders based on the active mechanisms in addictive drugs
- To improve, adapt, and expand appropriate pain treatment tailored to the genes of particular individuals from early stages of treatment
- To develop new treatments for developmental disorders, such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorders
Members
Project Leader Kazutaka Ikeda
- Soichiro Ide
- Masayo Fujita
- Seii Ohka
- Hiroko Kotajima
- Hiroki Furuie