Interesting meta-analysis showing enriched environments decreases cocaine-seeking across 48 rodent studies using CPP (A), self-administration (B), and locomotor sensitization (C). Remarkable reproducibility across laboratories, particularly for CPP.

Clever use of a complex behavioral task to show that BLA dopamine tracks emotional salience, not value or prediction error. Threat/Safety cues drive larger, sustained signals than reward/neutral cues. Dopamine in the BLA is very much different than in the striatum.

This paper took nine years and was, honestly, a labor of love and a fair amount of suffering. It took several labs, sustained NIH support, and a lot of people who stuck with it, a whole village!

Reduced drug use without full abstinence should count as success, not failure. 
This topic is very important to me, harm reduction is ALWAYS a success.

Add fentanyl to the list! Acute semaglutide blocks cue-, drug-, and stress-induced fentanyl seeking in rats, with drug- and stress-induced reinstatement dropping to the floor at every dose, and cue-induced seeking down about 70% at the higher doses.

I get more excited by a good behavioral pharmacology paper than by anything else. Great example. Heroin cues drive relapse-like seeking in rats after 385 days of abstinence. And a "drug not available" cue suppresses it just as long, even after a heroin injection. doi.org/10.1038/s41386-026-02447-6

One of the best and most interesting papers that I've read in the last year is even featured in a short podcast. Congrats on the fantastic work @brainaddiction.bsky.social! #RewardSignals

Behind this podcast is an outstanding student, Jarryd Ramborger. If you are interested in his approach using 60 cameras recording behavior simultaneously and a data pipeline using supercomputer clusters throughout the US, he’s your man!

Our latest episode of NPP BrainPod is out! "Incentive salience, not psychomotor sensitization or tolerance, drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats"

GLP-1 agonists will be the first meds for polysubstance use disorder. Cocaine, meth, nicotine, alcohol, opioids: same mechanism. For decades the field said animal models couldn't crack mental disorders. The preclinical peptide nerds were onto something. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2026.05.002

As a former smoker for 30+ years, nicotine e-cigs never worked for me. Varenicline did. That said, this is a clean randomized trial. 5% nicotine pod vs placebo vape, 6 weeks. 36.5% quit in the nicotine arm vs 11.5% in placebo. About 3x. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.13292

Go big or go home. Bigger reward, faster learning, not exactly news. The addiction field has long used 100 µL rewards. Much of systems neuro stuck with tiny ones, assuming DA saturated. It doesn't. Mice learn ~10x faster with a few large rewards. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeb0813

If you have any interest in science, medicine, veterinary medicine, biotechnology, agriculture, conservation, or the future of biomedical research, stop what you are doing and take 5 minutes to submit your input to NIH. You have only until next Tuesday May 26, Your voice MATTERS!

the technician position in my lab is now posted! Please pass this along: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/319...

Not buying the doomsday scenario. AI accelerates research and makes it more replicable, leading to more success, more growth, and more scientist employment, not less. The job will change. But we'll still need scientists to guide and curate. https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2056898746961846460

Interesting line from the Robin paper: "All hypotheses, experimental directions, data analyses, and figures in this report were produced by Robin." Curious what NIH thinks. They prohibit grant proposals "substantially developed by AI." https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2056898746961846460

One of many reasons we'll still need scientists for years to come in the AI world. Because sometimes AI produces dogshit, and while the techbros and VCs will gladly eat dogshit, a true human scientist will not. https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2056956645331410993

Longitudinal PET study of FAAH (enzyme degrading the endocannabinoid anandamide) in cannabis users. brain FAAH binding rises ~10% within days of stopping cannabis, with the biggest jump in the ventral striatum.

There is no free lunch in psychopharmacology: 21 longitudinal studies, ~28,000 people, ~24 yrs of follow-up. Cannabis use tracks with lower IQ and worse executive function over time. Effect scales with frequency and dependence. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-026-07072-1

Couldn't make GRS/GRC Addiction this year; it turns out my folks didn't really need me there ;-) Congrats @esneddon21, Kokila Shankar, and Selene Bonent-Zahedi!

Is symptom-based dosing for neonatal opioid withdrawal really better for the infant or just better for the hospital? This is a very interesting study recently highlighted by the NIH. Tailoring treatment to each infant's withdrawal severity is a real step forward.

NIAAA's P60 Alcohol Research Center mechanism is not being renewed. I’ve had the chance of being part of one for the last 20 years.

Fecal transplants in mice reduce nicotine withdrawal symptoms, showing fewer somatic signs and anxiety-like behaviors for up to a week. Glad I quit smoking already and don't need to try this ;-) @damajlab.bsky.social pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41874416/

Why female-specific research is critical to understand addiction?

Encouraging news about GLP1 and depression, anxiety, addiction. In 100,000+ Swedish cohort, Semaglutide and liraglutide lower the risk of worsening mental illness in diabetes patients with depression/anxiety/addiction.

A ketogenic diet alters alcohol metabolism in rats, showing 2-3x higher blood alcohol levels and a 20% reduction in alcohol dehydrogenase 1 protein in the liver.

The sky is the limit in bioengineering, just like an airplane's black box, this newly synthetic protein logs a timeline of biological signals within a single cell so that we can reconstruct the cell's history after the fact. this is completely surreal.

Very nice research Highlight in @npp_journal by Alex Kawa and the great Terry Robinson on our recent paper. This one feels extra special to me.

First head-to-head comparison of GR antagonism on alcohol vs opioid withdrawal with both male and females show that GR antagonist reduces alcohol and heroin withdrawal-induced hyperalgesia in both sex. These results parallel those found with CRF1 antagonists.

A beast of a paper from @byl015 @ucsandiego.bsky.social, dissecting the role of PFC interneurons (PV, SOM, VIP) controlling cocaine seeking. Normally, the PFC inhibits VTA DA neurons via a local GABA interneuron. Classic inhibitory role of the PFC over subcortical regions.

Impressive results from an exome study identifying gene variants in the beta 3 nicotinic receptor subunit that leads to an 80% reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked (not whether you will ever smoke) in East Asian and indigenous Mexican.

TRDRP just announced it’s moving away from investigator-initiated grants toward themed, programmatic calls.

This one hit close to home for me. A study of 500+ smokers showed that people with low self-efficacy benefited less from standard treatments and, in some cases, were even less likely to quit after treatment.

GLP-1R agonists decrease sexual behavior in female rats and mice, though the effects differ depending on the drug and species (expected). Regardless of the reward or behavior (food, alcohol, drugs, sex), GLP1 agonists are proving to be very general motivational repressors.

If, like me, the new biosketch website pissed you off. If HTML tags and constant PDF downloads to see the formatting drive you crazy when editing your NIH/NSF biosketch, try this.

Interesting new result: in a model of fear/stress/ptsd, second-order conditioning cue (SOC in the figure) that was never directly linked to danger being absent still reduced fear just as much as a true safety signal (S), as long as it is immediately preceding the safety cue.

Couldn’t agree more! We need to 10x polysubstance use research funding. We actually need whole research centers dedicated to basic research on polysubstance use. Right now they are almost all exclusively dedicated to a single substance.https://t.co/y4bmFOZ2YU

Very happy to share a new paper in @npp-journal.bsky.social I thought I knew what would predict escalation of cocaine use. Well, I was wrong. After tracking behavior daily for weeks, the answer turned out to be the opposite of my prediction, and it changed how I see addiction.

Could your initial response to a painkiller reveal your future risk of addiction? Excited to share our new paper where we conducted a massive behavioral screening to understand the behavioral patterns underlying addiction-like behaviors in rats and how they relate to each others A quick thread 👇

#ThisWeekInNPP Behavioral indices of incentive salience, not sensitization or tolerance, were highly predictive of escalation of cocaine self-admin, suggesting incentive salience as a critical behavioral indicator of vulnerability to cocaine use

Breaking initial resistance to incentive salience with sufficient drug exposure Individuals initially resistant to incentive salience can, with sufficient exposure, become sensitized and escalate cocaine use to the same level as more susceptible individuals www.nature.com/articles/s41...