The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the Yale School of Medicine
$23.4 million to study the interactive effects of stress and self-control on
tobacco smoking, excessive drinking and overeating.
T H I S
Yale was one of nine institutions, from among 100 applicants, to receive the
five-year grant from NIH’s Roadmap for Medical Research initiative. The
grant is intended to integrate aspects of different disciplines to address health
challenges that have been resistant to traditional approaches.
NIH Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni says the idea is to transform the way research
is conducted. “These programs are designed to encourage and enable change
in academic research culture to make interdisciplinary research easier to conduct
for scientists who wish to collaborate in unconventional ways,” he notes.
Yale School of Medicine Dean Dr. Robert Alpern says: “Yale scientists have
a long and distinguished record of discovery in fields that relate to stress,
self-control and substance abuse, including psychiatry, neurobiology, imaging
science, pharmacology and psychology. These resources — and the structure
for cross-disciplinary research that will result from the award — will
greatly accelerate the pace of discovery and are very likely to change the way
we think about and treat addictive behavior.”
Yale’s consortium is headed by Rajita Sinha, professor of psychiatry.
She says key factors in Yale’s winning the grant were the medical school’s
experience in organizing large scientific programs and centers, and the number
of senior level scientists already engaged in the related research. “A
key aspect of having these established research programs are the training opportunities
that this grant will make available to junior scientists,” Sinha says.
The consortium will be based at the newly established Yale Stress Center and
will involve 60 scientists from Yale as well as two collaborating institutions,
the University of California at Irvine and Florida State University. There are
10 different research projects that look primarily at stress and self-control
mechanisms that perpetuate and maintain the use and overuse of tobacco, alcohol
and unhealthy foods.
The goal, Sinha says, is to develop new pharmacological and/or behavioral interventions
to prevent and treat the compulsion and loss of control that accompanies tobacco
smoking, alcohol abuse, and overeating rich and highly palatable food. “We
also want to map out stress and environmental factors and biological and physiological
changes that result in individual maladaptive behaviors,” she says.
This is the second major Roadmap for Medical Research grant that the School of
Medicine received from NIH. In October 2006, Yale was awarded a $57.3 million
Clinical and Translational Science Award aimed at transforming how biomedical
researchers move laboratory discoveries into human studies, enabling faster and
more efficient development of new therapies.
W E E K ' SS T O R I E S
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