Brady Atwood
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Opioid and alcohol misuse cause enormous harm, and treatments remain limited. This research looks for how drugs change the connections between brain cells, called synapses, in regions that control drug-taking.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Pharmacology
- Topics
opioid use disorder
oxycodone
opioids
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2028
What they work on
- Test whether oxycodone increases tau protein expression, phosphorylation and oligomerization (clumping) in the mouse prefrontal cortex, and whether these changes cause synaptic dysfunction.
- Determine whether prefrontal cortical tau plays a causal role in raising oxycodone consumption, using a multidisciplinary approach in mice.
- Test whether prenatal methadone exposure strengthens glutamate signaling from the anterior insular cortex to the dorsolateral striatum only in male mice, using brain-slice electrophysiology, reporter mice, synaptic proteomics and expansion microscopy.
- Determine whether these insular-to-striatum synapses drive the elevated binge-like alcohol drinking of males exposed to methadone before birth, using home-cage drinking and wireless in vivo optogenetics.
More about the research
Both projects use mice. One asks whether opioids change a protein best known from Alzheimer's disease, and the other asks how opioid exposure before birth sets up heavier alcohol drinking later in life.
Why it matters
If opioid-induced changes in tau help drive opioid intake, drugs first developed for tau-related dementias might one day be repurposed to treat opioid use disorder, a new avenue against the opioid epidemic. The number of babies born to opioid-dependent mothers has risen more than 300%. Learning how prenatal methadone exposure raises later alcohol drinking, especially in males, could help explain and eventually reduce these children's risk of alcohol use disorder.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rupa Radhakrishnan
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how prenatal opioid exposure affects the developing fetal brain over time, using repeated structural and functional fetal brain MRI in pregnancies of mothers with opioid use disorder.
Samuel Centanni
Wake Forest University, NC·Neuroscience
Test whether stress-driven activity in the insula-BNST pathway predicts later binge and aversion-resistant ethanol drinking, following mouse models of stress and binge drinking over time.
Brian Mathur
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Neuroscience
Determine the circuit-specific synaptic mechanisms by which acute ethanol strengthens GABAergic (inhibitory) input to dorsolateral striatum fast-spiking interneurons (FSIs), using molecular tools and whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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