Exploring the Potential of Glia for Regulating Clinically Relevant Opiod Actions

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It has recently been discovered that glia become progressively more activated upon repeated exposure to morphine, & that this glial activation, in turn, modulates morphine's effects. This discovery was originally made in the context of studying the pain suppressive effects of morphine in spinal cord. The possibility that glia may be fundamentally important in determining the effects of opioids such as morphine is novel & important in its implications. Because of this, we propose to explore whether glia may profoundly alter the effects of repeated morphine in brain, as well. We believe that glia will prove to be powerfully involved in several phenomena currently thought to arise purely as a result of opioid effects on neurons; that is, dependence/withdrawal, reward & aversion. If this were true, it would provide evidence that glia are critically involved, not only in modulating the pain-suppressive effects of opioids, but also in