Firing a Laser Into Your Brain Could Help Beat a Drug Addiction

An anonymous reader writes "The prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex in the human brain is thought to play a key role in drug addiction, and researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse wanted to see if manipulating cells there had a positive or negative impact on that addiction. They got some rats addicted to cocaine but not before loading them up with light sensitive proteins called rhodopsins that were placed in their prefrontal cortex, attaching to the neurons there. By shining a tuned laser light on to the prefrontal cortex, it was possible to activate and deactivate the cells. By turning them on with the laser, the addictive behavior of the rats was removed. Turning them off, even in non-addicted rats, saw the addictive behavior return or introduced."

Comments

A laser to the brain

[Divebus]

Could also cure breathing.

Re:A laser to the brain

[Anonymous Coward]

Just looked at the paper and...Where is the scatter plot between lever presses and cocaine infusions??? NATURE EDITORS, DEMAND TO SEE THE ACTUAL DATA AND NOT JUST AVERAGES. Put it in the supplements if it is too complicated for the normal audience.

Re:A laser to the brain

[TapeCutter]

Redundant is appropriate, by definition the raw data is redundant after it has been properly analyzed, by definition a published paper is a "proper" analysis. It may be wrong but if it's the only analysis then by definition it is the best analysis we have. Einstein's famous 1905 paper was 3 pages long and had zero references, it was quickly recognized as a work of uncommon genius by other physicists.

The first thing they teach you in statistics is to create a scatter plot and just eyeball it for a one of several standard curves that MIGHT fit, the next step is averages (or some other metric) to see if your guess holds up to scrutiny. Thing is, eye-balling is not evidence and publishing only the calculated curve is normal practice. I don't have a Nature account so I can't easily confirm/deny the AC's claim that the raw data is unavailable (ironically because the AC did not publish his raw data). However since this looks like government funded research I think it's more likely the AC just eye-balled the paper and missed it.

Besides all that, a real scientist wouldn't bitch and moan if they couldn't find the raw data, they would just contact the author and ask politely, if that didn't work they would run their own experiments. At the end of the day the scientific way to overturn the results from one experiment is run one or more independent experiments that convincingly refute the original results.

To paraphrase one of the best science teachers to ever walk the earth - "The key to science is that if your beautifully presented, leather bound, iron-clad logic disagrees with experiments, it's wrong". - Feynman

Re:A laser to the brain

[Ash-Fox]

Most of the proper scientists abandoned slashdot years ago, though. It's interesting to go back 10 years or so and compare the quality of the posts to what we have today.

I am afraid I cannot accept that information on just face value. Please provide the study you used so we can critique the results properly.

Re:A laser to the brain

[Anonymous Coward]

A simple CITATION NEEDED would have sufficed. Get off my lawn.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original article clearly was not read. These rats had their genome changed to have more rhodopsins in their prefrontal cortex. This will not happen with humans in advance of any drug addiction issues (it would have to be done with the sperm/egg?). tldr; not going to happen.

Re:Really?

[durrr]

Optogenetics (as the technique is more commonly called) can be 'installed' with gene therapy vectors in adult mammals, the technique can be used for both activating and silencing cells.

It have not been tried in humans due the excessive caution around everything that is gene therapy, along with the requirement for some mildly invasive neurosurgery.

Re:Really?

[Samantha Wright]

And the award for most horrifically insane misinterpretation of an optogenetics paper goes to... Geek.com!

Based on actually skimming the paper, I would guess that the kind of excitation they're doing is probably safe in humans, although likely to cause interesting sensations.

Also, the blood-brain barrier makes it rather hard to perform gene therapy on the human nervous system, doesn't it?

Re:Really?

[SuricouRaven]

Gene therapy is just hard in general. The exact effect of a virus is unpredictable, it'll only alter a small number of cells at best and will likely kill a lot more in the attempt, or turn them cancerous. It isn't even out of clinical trial yet. The blood-brain barrier shouldn't pose any difficulty though: Simply inject directly into CSF and bypass it entirely.

Re:Really?

[Niedi]

Gene therapy is not particularly hard, and there's clinical trials and decades old cases where it have had success. Why is this myth propagated? Did the major fuckup and misconduct in the Jesse Gelsinger case really have that much publicity?

Though I guess, every religious nut, moral-code internet warrior, environmentalist nutcase and anti-GMO opinionist would of course latch onto this outlier case and present it as a rule rather than exception, because some delusion of purity is more important than saving and improving lives.

Disclaimer: I work in neuroscience and have used viral transfection quite a lot.

Myth? It's not trivial to get the infectous titer and purity of the virus right and it's even harder (read: almost impossible) to predict the exact expression levels that the virus will cause in an actual brain. Much less if such a potential overexpression of a non-native protein will mess up regular cell trafficking/function. Even if the protein is thought to be harmless (as is the case with Channelrhodopsin or Halorhodopsin), the sheer fact that the cell now has to produce, store and process large numbers of something it usually doesn't have can cause problems and take resources away from the normal function. Plus any virus that will stably integrate into the genome can cause all kinds of fuck up down the road since you don't know WHERE it will integrate and what other function it might overwrite.

Don't get me wrong, it is interesting, it is potentially very beneficial but I'd still be cautious when applying it in the brain (as opposed to applying it in muscle or skin cells) since adult neurogenesis isn't really happening much...

Re:Really?

[EndlessNameless]

Electroconvulsive therapy is broad, and even its most targeted implemented sends electricity to places it doesn't need to go. It must also pass through tissues that have no therapeutic reason to be exposed to electric current.

An internally-mounted system could be far more precise; possibly even as good as this experiment.

The best analogy I can come up with is: ECT is like trying to chisel a sculpture with a jackhammer.

Firing a Laser Into Your Brain to cure addiction

[Gumbercules!!]

Would work for sure.... probably want to carefully define "cure" however.

Finally ...

[Skapare]

... a use for my Wicked Laser. Oh wait, which one should I use? Teh green one? Teh blue one?

Re:Finally ...

[Opportunist]

Ohhhhh... colors....

Sure

[no-body]

Lobotomy was used once as a remedy for many things...

Folks changed after that. Some think to the better for society.

Depends on perspective.

Addiction

[geekymachoman]

So, this might be an end to nicotine/cigarettes ?

I'm just mentioning it. Since people obviously think that "drug addiction" means "cocaine/heroine addiction".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence#Addictive_potential

How many people are cocaine/heroin addicts and how many are nicotine addicts ?

Re:Addiction

[fishybell]

Unfortunately, I say the answer is quite likely yes, and probably better than it would treat drug addiction.
Unfortunately, as people aren't rats — and probably the best thing I took away from rehab — you don't have a drug problem, you have drug solution to your person problems. People use drugs to turn off their shitty lives. Of course, drugs lead to shitty lives and the cycle continues, but fixing the "I'm not addicted to drug X" problem won't fix the fact that people relapse after years and years not because they are still dependent, but because drugs work very well at turning your life off, if even for just a little while.

Re:Addiction

[Hartree]

It's more than just the political reasons. Cocaine is a pretty direct and uncomplicated way to manipulate a dopamine pathway like the reward system.
Heroin and alcohol have more complex modes of action to hit the reward system. When you're still trying to work out the pathway and its dynamics you want to avoid complicating effects.

It's sort of the lab rat of addictions to study.

Re:Good call

[Nyder]

The War or Drugs will be stopped once and for all when this laser comes out.

The War on Drugs could be stopped by making drugs legal.

this doesn't solve the problem.

[Nyder]

Let's take heroin addiction for example. You know how many heroin addicts that get clean, yet go back to using the heroin? Pretty much all of them. Turning off the "addictive" cell won't change that. It's not about the addiction, it's about the high. It's about how the drug makes you feel.

Re:this doesn't solve the problem.

[Samantha Wright]

They're not turning off anything, actually; they're restoring normal function that's destroyed by the addiction. This is the sort of stuff that stays behind after recovery and that makes it easy to relapse. The behavioural studies they performed more-or-less modelled the situation you describe: the researchers found that after four doses of cocaine, rats would normally ignore electric shocks in order to get at the drug. After treatment, the rats became less obsessed with the high and would not risk getting electrocuted again in order to have it. It wasn't as much of a return to normal function as a rat that had only had cocaine once, but it took a while to return to full addict behaviour.

So, yes, it does address the functional problem that normal rehab fails to remedy. The area they chose to stimulate was specifically implicated as being responsible for loss of control in addicts.

Re:this doesn't solve the problem.

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

No, they go back because it alleviates serious pain from major mental illness, which the vast majority of addicts have. By "major mental illness" I don't mean just garden-variety depression or anxiety, but disorders that cause wild mood swings to enraged/suicidal/terrified out of the blue, scary hallucinations, and so forth. They also don't develop coping skills for daily life, so the problems we quickly deal with & move beyond accumulate for them until they can reach their method of coping (e.g. the substance). That's why they go back to cocaine or whatever their substance of choice is -- and also why so many of them end up on the streets.

Yes.... yeeeesss...

[RyanFenton]

From the Journal of Mad Science: A Cure for Addiction

Crazy they called me! CRAZY! But it is not _I_ who have surrendered the war on drugs! I know drugs - and the only real cure is PAIN. And the best PAIN? Direct laser to the brain!

Now, I know what you're all thinking! Dr. Madd, you're thinking, the brain doesn't have any pain receptors! You're thinking I just want to cure addiction with death! Ha! Death is no cure - it is FAILURE.

For you see - this is not some fleshy-burny laser, oh no! This is a laser set to trigger two particular threshold states in the neurotransmitter pathways... specifically, the pathways relating to heat, and cold.

And as any CHILD knows, both of those combined equate to the sensation of PAIN. Raw, sweet PAIN - far sweeter than any drug. Such an all-encompassing PAIN.

Such ecstasy an horror is unleashed, that the mind scrambles through everything it can, just to make sense of it. The end result is usually one of two things - a hyper-receptive state, where the ... subject is willing to accept instruction in thanks for the experience, or a simple silence that at least commits no more crimes such as seeking out drugs.

Such a cure! Were I a less modest man, I would call it a REVOLUTION in treatment!

I expect to be able to roll out full production within the next two to five years, and am highly interested in investments.

-Dr Maddeus Maddington Madd III, esq.

You are wrong. Cocaine IS addictive.

[girlinatrainingbra]

re: cocaine was a terrible example since it really is not addictive to begin with.. [emphasis mine]
.
Dude! You think cocaine is not addictive? You're completely wrong. It is addictive because of its effect on the mesolimbic reward pathway. I link you to wikipedia's article on cocaine because the medical articles I found are behind paywalls and you might not be able to get to them unless you're on a university network that has medical journal access like UCSD does: Data from The Lancet suggests cocaine is ranked both the 2nd most addictive and the 2nd most harmful of 20 popular recreational drugs.

another quote from the same article:

It is addictive because of its effect on the mesolimbic reward pathway.

You are wrong. Cocaine IS addictive.