Brown University neuroscience professor Gilad Barnea will receive a nearly $1.3 million, four-year federal grant toward development of a method to selectively monitor the activation of each of the five receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.
If he succeeds, the achievement could lead to more targeted treatments for several mental illnesses and a number of other diseases.
"It can make a big impact on the development of new drugs for multiple disorders," said Barnea, assistant professor of neuroscience.
The award, known as a EUREKA grant, is funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health. EUREKA grants - for Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration - are part of a new NIH initiative, less than two years old, that funds innovative, high-risk/high reward research.
Barnea will use the funding to develop a method for selectively monitoring the activation of each of the five dopamine receptors in the brain, without interference from the others. Such an advance matters because often several different receptors, beyond the one that physicians and scientists wish to target, respond to the same drug. This imperfect process leads to side effects from drugs that could be more beneficial if they worked in a more precise way. The membranes of all the cells in the body contain many receptors that receive signals from outside the cell and translate them into various responses inside the cell. These responses can include alteration of gene expression.
The ability to monitor the activation of a single dopamine receptor would be crucial for developing more precise and effective treatments for several mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity, as well as for other disorders such as addiction, Parkinson's disease and hypertension.