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The research group Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology of the University of Murcia fights against addiction, specifically, look for new drugs that manage to prevent the relapse of addicts, who even years after having broken with these substances, are again consumed by the Memory and stress
This team studies the molecular mechanisms that are involved in associative learning and that lead addicts to relapse.
The research, carried out with rodents, shows that when they are hooked on a substance, in this case they have been treated with cocaine and opiates, when they go to a place where they have consumed it before they feel the same pleasure as when they took it.
As is the case with humans when they associate smoking with social habits such as coffee, memory is to blame for this association, and with that, for its relapse.
The same thing happens with stress, when a person has been hooked to a drug, in a situation of anxiety will seek the object of their addiction to counteract the problem, that is, before a bad news, they will go to the tobacco to calm down, although the effects That produces are the opposites.
The solution researchers propose is to use drugs that break this brain connection between remembering a place or any other stimuli related to the drug and consumption in order to try to avoid relapses.
Professor María Victoria Milanés, principal investigator, and Professor Cristina Nuñez, researcher on the project, have a long history of studying in the field of addiction.
Currently, addiction is considered a disease, a chronic condition, whose fundamental characteristic is that once you start to consume a substance, despite knowing that it is harmful to your health and your life, it is still consumed.
This same symptomatology also appears in the addiction to other factors as diverse as the new technologies, the game or the sexual relations.
Fortunately, some of these drugs are in Phase Three clinical trials.
This means that they have passed three of the four phases that a drug must pass to enter the market.
A process that can last up to fifteen years.
This supposes good news since it means that perhaps soon, projects like this one financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, will finally have its opportune application and be available to the consumer.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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