HIGH POINT, N.C., Jan. 26, 2016 – The National Institutes of Health featured a research paper about a new treatment for addiction authored by Dr. Comfort Boateng, assistant professor of pharmacy at High Point University.
The paper, titled “High Affinity Dopamine D3 Receptor (D3R)-Selective Antagonists Attenuate Heroin Self-Administration in Wild-Type but not D3R Knockout Mice,” discusses the development of novel and “drug-like” compounds Boateng and her co-authors are testing as alternative treatments for psychiatric disorders such as addiction.
“This is the first study to show the effectiveness of our developed ‘drug-like’ compounds as an alternate medication strategy to methadone maintenance or buprenorphine, the current pharmacotherapeutic treatments for heroin addiction patients,” she says.
Her paper is the January featured research for the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and is posted at http://irp.drugabuse.gov/hotpapers.php. She conducted this research with her mentor, Dr. Amy Newman, at the Molecular Targets and Medications Discovery Branch of the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
Boateng is the recipient of several awards and honors from the NIH, including a fellowship at the National Institute of Drug Abuse, a research internship at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Fellows Award for Research Excellence 2016.