UTMB plans to establish the Translational Addiction Sciences Center, with the goal of discovering and validating novel treatment options to fight addiction, thanks to a five-year, $6.6. million dollar grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The Translational Addiction Sciences Center is a dynamic, new project that brings together a team of addiction experts from a range of professional research and clinical disciplines to achieve the goal of advancing research and care for those who struggle with addiction. Principal investigator Dr. Kathryn Cunningham, who also leads UTMB’s Center for Addiction Research, noted that one of the team’s main goals in translating these studies into real-life use is to apply it toward treating cocaine addiction. Researchers will conduct experiments to identify targets the serotonin system of the brain that are directly involved in behaviors related to cocaine relapses among addicts, all as a means of designing new therapeutic molecules that could potentially selectively affect these targets, and then validating these new molecules to see if they could be viable as potential medications in order to support abstinence from cocaine use. The news also appears on Phys.org.