WSUV professor snags $1.6 million for research

Sunday, December 7 | 10:38 p.m.

BY STEPHANIE RICE
COLUMBIAN STAFF WRITER for www.columbian.com

Photo: Professor Susan Ingram, who works in the psychology department at Washington State University Vancouver, received $1.6 million to study how dopamine neurons communicate with each other in the brain and how drugs such as amphetamines later that process. The goal is finding better ways to treat addicts or even prevent addictions. (N. SCOTT TRIMBLE/THE COLUMBIAN)

As a psychology undergraduate at Bowdoin College in Maine in the late 1980s, Susan Ingram graded behavioral tests that a professor gave to schizophrenic patients. It was also Ingram’s duty to talk to the patients and get them to take the multiple-choice tests, and she remembers her first visit to a mental institution, where she was allowed to observe patients.

Ingram, now a professor at Washington State University Vancouver, traces her fascination with the inner workings of the brain back to those days.

Her fascination continued as a neuroscience graduate student at Oregon Health & Science University, where she studied how the brain changes in response to opiates and amphetamines.

She still marvels at how brains change, whether in response to genetic flaws, environmental factors or ingestion of toxic substances.

Now, with a $1.6 million, five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, Ingram’s taking her studies into uncharted territory.

Research has shown that psychostimulants such as amphetamine are so addictive because they increase activity among the neurons that produce dopamine, a chemical best known for the feel-good rush we get when we savor a good meal or have sex.

Ingram’s work will focus on whether, when it comes to drugs, there’s another cycle at work: Does dopamine unlock a novel brain ion channel, resulting in the high that drug abusers crave?

“If we can find out more about how dopamine neurons communicate with each other, and how psychostimulants alter that communication, we might be able to exploit this knowledge for therapy,” Ingram said. “We also hope to better understand how to prevent addiction.”

Ingram will be assisted by as many as five undergraduate students and one post-doctorate fellow.

The opening of the brain channel is a possible effect of dopamine that has yet to be researched, Ingram said.

Under her theory, dopamine would unlock the channel no matter what pleasurable activity triggered the production of dopamine. Instead of studying the socially acceptable triggers of sex and food, however, she’s studying drugs because it’s the easiest way to turn on dopamine production in a brain that’s not attached to a body.

Thin slices of brain tissue from laboratory rats — the slices can be kept alive for up to one day in a special solution — will be examined under a fluorescent microscope.

The scope relies on a special fluorescence protein found in jellyfish, Ingram said. The protein sensor glows yellow, and is sensitive to the ions that flow through the brain channel when it opens. The brightness of the yellow depends on the amount of dopamine that activates the channel.

To gauge how dopamine manifests in the brains of chronic drug users, rats will be injected over time with amphetamines before their brains are examined.

If Ingram finds that this brain channel plays a significant role in regulating dopamine levels, could it be possible that blocking the channel would help addicts? That’s just one of her many questions about the role dopamine plays in addiction.

As a requirement of the five-year grant, Ingram will write annual progress reports and try to build on her dopamine theory, finding new angles to explore. It’s impossible to predict what she’ll be able to accomplish in the next five years.

“Almost every experiment you do opens new questions,” she said.

Tags: addiction, brain function, drug addiction, National Institutes of Health, neuroscience of addiction, sex addiction, substance abuse, Susan Ingram

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