Breakthrough research from Ream Al-Hasani, Ph.D., assistant professor of pharmaceutical science at University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, and her research team at the Center for Clinical Pharmacology, has identified a new pathway in the brain that may contribute to more effective treatments for drug addiction and depression.
This discovery builds on Al-Hasani’s previous research, which focused on reward processing and identifying the reward processing functions within the sub-regions of the nucleus accumbens region of the brain.
Through her current research, recently published in Nature Neuroscience, Al-Hasani and her team have uncovered a new role in reward processing for the neurotransmitter, GABA, which projects from the ventral tegmental area of the brain to the ventral nucleus accumbens shell.