A new treatment approach with designer proteins could disrupt the cycle of addiction by rewiring addiction without stifling natural pleasure.

UC San Diego researchers, along with those from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, have developed a new biochemical approach to fight addiction, which may lead to gene therapies for cocaine addiction that don’t impact the enjoyment of regular activities.

The results, published Aug 27 in Nature, showed that by custom engineering proteins in the brain (called ion channels) to be activated by cocaine, the new approach is able to reverse the rewarding effect of cocaine, but only when cocaine is actually present in the body, effectively breaking the positive feedback loop of addiction.

Addiction is driven by positive feedback loops in the brain; these same neural responses are also involved in enjoyment of natural rewards like food or exercise. One goal of addiction research is to find ways to reverse this cycle of addiction without affecting enjoyment of natural rewards.

Using a rat model, the researchers, led by Scott Sternson, Ph.D., in the Department of Neurosciences at the UCSD School of Medicine and Michael Michaelides at NIDA, found rats expressing the cocaine-activated ion channels showed a significant decrease in cocaine-seeking behavior.

Those expressed channels did not affect food seeking or other natural behaviors in the absence of cocaine.

The researchers hypothesized that this approach could be extended to other addictive substances but more research is needed.