More than 50 students and faculty, along with academic, industry and governmental partners of Northeastern’s Center for Drug Discovery, convened earlier this month for the 10th annual symposium on current trends in drug-abuse research.
The CDD takes an interdisciplinary approach to discovering novel medications and drug-development methods. The daylong symposium featured presentations on a variety of research areas, each important to understanding the biology of addiction and the discovery of therapeutic interventions for those addictions.
At the beginning of the day, CDD Director Alexandros Makriyannis — the George D. Behrakis Chair in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, who holds joint appointments in the College of Science and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences — noted that presentations would relate to drugs of abuse as well as conditions connected to drug abuse. “It will be a truly interdisciplinary event,” he said, noting that the topics would range from the identification of novel targets for insulin resistance to a potential chemical approach for diagnosing certain types of cancer.
Northeastern doctoral candidates Kyle Whitten and Mahmoud Nasr presented results from two distinct areas of research in the Makriyannis lab.
Whitten focused his talk on the synthesis of a class of novel chemicals and their interactions with the endocannabinoid system. Nasr focused his discussion on the importance of new nanoprobes for identifying elevated levels of monoacylglycerol lipase, a molecule associated with many cancers.
“You could use this method to selectively label a single protein,” Nasr said.
David Janero, the center’s deputy director, ushered the program. The graduate student presentations, he said, demonstrated the “kind of meshwork between chemistry and biology that is at the foundation of drug discovery.”
Two keynote speakers, Jane Acri of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Lakshmi Devi of Mt. Sinai Medical School, examined the receptors involved in drug addiction, which must be understood in order to develop intervention strategies.
“We’re not just developing drugs ourselves,” said Acri, who is part of NIDA’s medication discovery program. “We’re also trying to help you develop drugs.”
In another presentation, Jack Bergman, a collaborator of the Makriyannis lab based at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, described the behavioral effects of several of the center’s drugs, which, unlike their commercially available counterparts, have significantly fewer side effects.
Of grave importance, for our children, and tomorrow’s children is the work done at the CDD at NEU, run by Dr. Alex Marykinnanis. It is imperative that we get NIH to fund, to as high a degree possible, their work, on drugs of abuse. If you are wondering, what this means…do a search on You Tube alone…to find out all of the LEGAL DRUGS that childeren/adults can abuse. They are not even fully aware of the consequences, as “head shops” are not found usually to be in compliance with FDA regs. NBC and CBS have done documentaries on this. But for our own info…please see You Tube…I believe the gentleman’s name is stevehyxhammer666, and as you can see, he’s taken time to promote these drugs, really primarily known to folks from the CDD, but unknown to the general public. I can’t thank them enough, nor urge NIH to fund them enough, that they may continue to help us parent, and for those of us who counsel, or do medical work with this population…that they may help us remain INFORMED. We need not FIGHT the WAR on drugs, with guns. OUR MOST POWERFUL WEAPON IS KNOWLEDGE…and the CDD PROVIDES THIS KNOWLEDGE TO US! God bless them! Indeed, a job for and from God.