Albany Medical College Receives $1.6 Million NIH Grant
ALBANY, N.Y., May 6, 2010— Lindsay Hough, Ph.D., professor and associate director of the Center for Neuropharmacology and Neuroscience at Albany Medical College, has received a 5-year, $1.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue his search for new kinds of pain relievers that lack addictive properties of drugs like morphine.
The grant enables Dr. Hough and his team to continue to examine the role a family of proteins in the brain known as cytochrome P450 epoxygenases play in spurring morphine’s pain relieving actions. Knowing this, says Dr. Hough, will bring him and his team a step closer to the development of a new class of pain relieving drugs that may not have the detrimental side effects of morphine, which include constipation, respiratory distress and addiction.
“The more we understand about how morphine is processed in the brain, and what specifically makes it an effective pain reliever, the closer we position ourselves to being able to develop equally effective drugs, but ones that might have fewer side effects,” said Dr. Hough.
In earlier studies at Albany Medical College, Hough and his team discovered improgan, a novel pain-relieving agent that doesn’t have the side effects of morphine but which—thus far—has proved to be impractical since it must be injected directly into the brain to be effective. In this earlier research, Hough and his team suspected that P450 played an important role in interacting with improgan to alleviate pain. He and his team wondered if it would play a similar role with morphine and their latest research confirmed that it does.
In a series of experiments using mice and rats, the team of scientists has already shown that when P450 epoxygenases were blocked—either by drug inhibitors or by gene manipulation methods—there was a significant loss in the pain-relieving properties of morphine.
“Discovery of the significance of epoxygenase enzymes within the brain’s pain-relieving pathways requires many additional experiments to identify the specific cells, circuits, and molecules which may be critical for pain relief,” noted Dr. Hough. “But now that we know these proteins are essential in the brain’s pain-relieving response, there is the potential to eventually produce new kinds of drugs that relieve pain without side effects.”
Hough’s research was published in the February edition of Nature Neuroscience. Xinxin Ding, Ph.D., chief, Laboratory of Molecular Toxicology at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center, was co-author on the research and will collaborate on the grant.
At Albany Medical College, one of the nation’s oldest medical schools, basic research scientists work to facilitate discoveries that translate into medical innovations at patients’ bedsides. NIH-funded scientists are conducting research in many exciting areas including infectious disease, biodefense, addiction, cancer, pain, and more.
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Sue Ford
