Addiction treatments of the future: The role of genetics.

This session of the 2008 NIDA Blending Conference featured three presentations about the role of genetics in addiction treatment. The first, by Mary Jeanne Kreek, provides a detailed description of how addiction develops and the hypothesis that it is driven by an atypical responsivity to stressors that may be genetic in nature. An overview of the way genetics have been studied in the addiction field is also provided.

The second and third presentations, by Louise Haynes and Allan Cohen respectively, introduce a new CTN protocol, CTN-0027a (an adjunct to CTN-0027, “Starting Treatment with Agonist Replacement Therapies (START)”) called “START Pharmacogenetics: Exploratory Genetic Studies in Starting Treatment with Agonist Replacement Therapies.” This study will ask for volunteers participating in START to provide blood samples that will be examined for the frequency of gene variants that have primarily been associated with addiction. The “START Genetics” protocol is the first, but hopefully not the last, genetics study conducted within the CTN. Details of the study’s objectives and methods are included in Cohen’s presentation.

Related protocols: CTN-0027, CTN-0027-A-1