Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine will establish a new Center of Excellence in which psychiatry and radiology researchers will use PET imaging to study neurobiological changes associated with opioid use disorder.
The Penn PET Addiction Center of Excellence is funded by a five-year, $8.9 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It will be led by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's radiology and psychiatry departments and Center for Studies of Addiction, and from New Haven, Conn.-based Yale University's PET Center.
The researchers will use the information they gather about the neurobiology of opioid abuse to develop new interventions for opioid use disorder. Initial research will focus on opioid receptors in opioid sensitivity, addiction and suicide, as well as on the identification of genetic differences associated with the disorder, which will enable a precision medicine approach to diagnosis and treatment of patients.
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