Probing and manipulating the hippocampus-accumbens-VTA circuit in drug addiction
Luke Sjulson
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Abstract: It has long been known that exposure to contextual cues previously paired with drug use is likely to trigger relapse. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss progress we have made toward understanding the role of selective plasticity in the hippocampus to nucleus accumbens pathway in storing drug-context associations. In the second half, I will discuss translational applications, including the development of a therapeutic strategy for opioid use disorder based on a novel chemogenetic opioid receptor mutant.
website: https://sjulsonlab.org/