Collins announces $11.7 million grant to study root causes of drug addiction

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) announced on Thursday that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded a five-year grant to Jackson Laboratory that will total more than $11.7 million.

The Jackson Laboratory, which has a facility in Bar Harbor, Maine, will use the grant to establish a new Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction (CSNA) to study traits in mice that make them predisposed to drug addiction.

With the heroin and opioid crisis devastating communities throughout the country, Collins and U.S. Sen. Angus King (I-ME) said in a joint statement, it is critical to build a better understanding of the science behind addiction.

“The Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction will provide critical insights in the battle against the drug epidemic, and we commend Jackson Laboratory for its commitment to this important mission,” Collins and King said.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse – one of the 27 institutes and centers that forms the National Institutes of Health – will provide approximately $2.6 million in the 2016-2017 budget period to fund the CSNA.

The CSNA will employ behavioral neuroscientists, computational biologists and geneticists to study the behavior of a wide variety of laboratory mice to help understand factors that predispose them to addiction. Those factors will then be correlated the genomes of the mice to establish datasets that will be used to explain components of human addiction.