BEHAVIORAL PHARMACOLOGY OF OPIOIDS

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This application describes a request for an ADAMHA Research Scientist Development Award for Dr. Charles P. France. The Department of Pharmacology at LSU Medical Center has a strong and growing research effort in ares of drug abuse and I will use the support provided by an RSDA to expand our overall drug abuse research program. Specifically, this request is an attempt to provide reliable salary support for me so that I can increase my research efforts in drug abuse, compete for additional extramural funds to support drug abuse research in my laboratory, and maintain an laboratory environment conducive to the training of young researchers in the behavioral pharmacology of drug abuse. My current formal teaching requirements as well as committee assignments will be reduced in the event this application is awarded. The primary areas of research supported by this application involve the use of drug discrimination procedures to study opioid dependence and withdrawal in nonhuman species. This research attempts to characterize important behavioral and pharmacological features of opioid dependence as well as identify novel compounds that might be effective in the treatment of opioid abuse. Moreover, receptor theory will be applied extensively to discrimination and other behavioral procedures both to test the utility of this approach and to characterize drug affinity, selectivity and efficacy in vivo. Other procedures that will be used in concert with drug discrimination procedures include analgesia studies in monkeys and mice, self-administration studies in rodents and monkeys, and studies in the electrically-stimulated mouse vas deferens. In addition, I will continue to pursue collaborative research on the immunologic effects of opioids in monkeys and in mice as well as studies on the importance of metabolic factors in the behavioral pharmacology of drugs of abuse. The RSDA will allow me to take advantage of the expertise of my current collaborators, particularly those with more molecular approaches. A continued and more extensive interaction with these scientists will increase my knowledge of various areas within pharmacology that are important to drug abuse in general.