BU Researchers Awarded Addiction Training Grant from Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
Researchers from the BU Schools of Medicine and Public Health have been awarded a five-year, $2.5 million training grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to support specialized, multi-disciplinary PhD training for addiction scientists.
Lindsay Farrer, professor of biomedical genetics at the BU School of Medicine, and Timothy Heeren, professor of biostatistics at BUSPH, will lead the Transformative Training Program in Addiction Science (TTPAS). Farrer co-directs the nation’s largest genetics study of addiction to cocaine, opiates, alcohol, and nicotine among Caucasians and African Americans. Heeren is currently studying the effects of maternal cocaine use on child development and the impact of alcohol addiction on HIV treatment outcomes.
“Addictions to smoking, alcohol, and illicit drugs are among the nation’s most critical public health and societal problems,” the proposal summary says. “The genetic vulnerability, environmental exposures, and individual behaviors that contribute to the brain dysfunction and compulsive tendencies that mark addiction make it one of the most complicated diseases to study and treat.
“Some researchers, especially at Boston University, have developed multi-disciplinary collaborations, but training addiction scientists still proceeds in disciplinary silos, preventing emergence of the broad skill set needed for genuine breakthroughs. TTPAS will prepare investigators to apply diverse approaches to addiction research using tools from bench science, medicine, population studies, statistics, and computational biology.”
TTPAS will have three core components: a biweekly seminar focusing on how different disciplines approach a similar issue in addiction; multiple mentors from different disciplines for each trainee and multi-disciplinary dissertation committees; and a clinical module enabling trainees to interact with people in addiction treatment/recovery. The program includes a concentrated effort to achieve student diversity and to assure that all trainees have a thorough understanding of the intellectual bases, techniques, and languages of reporting in all the disciplines, to facilitate effective communication.
The co-leaders will be supported by a large group of established BU addiction scientists in medicine, psychology, neuroscience, pharmacology, biology, psychiatry, social work, engineering, biostatistics, informatics, health services research and public health, who already are linked together through multi-disciplinary faculty seminars.
BU faculty investigators currently direct more than 50 funded addiction-related research projects, including pharmacological and neurocognitive mechanisms regulating drug withdrawal and relapse in animal models; the relationship between long-term alcohol abuse and decrements in brain structure and cognitive-emotional functioning; and the efficacy of pharmacological treatments for alcoholism in a clinic population.