Research led by senior author David Dietz, PhD, has revealed that in certain types of brain cells, drug-induced plasticity can work to reduce the motivation to use heroin.

Published online in Neuropsychopharmacology, the paper describes how glial (non-neuronal) cells regulate both cellular and behavioral responses to heroin.

Offering possible targets for future addiction therapies

By providing new insights into how addiction changes the brain, the research could lead to novel approaches to treatments and potential new targets besides neurons.

“Most therapies have focused on the blocking or activating of receptors that bind drugs like heroin,” notes Dietz, interim chair and associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and a faculty member with UB’s neuroscience program.

“While that approach may be effective in the short-term, it doesn’t get to the fundamental problem of what is addiction and how to prevent it, as well as prevent relapse.”

Dietz says that not much is known about glial cells in the context of addiction.

“In the addiction field, most neuroscientists focus on neurons. Very rarely have they studied glial cells in psychiatric diseases. This work demonstrates an essential role of glia in addictive behaviors and offers us the ability to provide a new set of targets for future therapies toward the treatment of addiction,” he explains.

Studying how opiates affect OPCs in prefrontal cortex

Dietz and his colleagues decided to study the potential role of glial cells in addiction when they found that RNA sequencing of tissue from heroin-addicted animals revealed changes in genes that are traditionally markers for a type of glial stem cell called oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs).

The research is likely the first to investigate how opiates affect adult OPCs in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complex cognitive behaviors and is a main target of addictive drugs.

“We found that many of the genes regulated by heroin aligned with the profile of OPCs, so something was going on with them,” he says.

OPCs, he explained, are stem cells that can differentiate into myelinating oligodendrocytes, which are critical for efficient communication between neurons.

Dietz collaborated with coauthor Fraser J. Sim, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology and a faculty member with UB’s neuroscience program. In 2014, Sim identified one of the genes, SOX10, as a “master switch” for the differentiation of these stem cells towards myelination.

Results: Brain might be trying to normalize function

To determine what was happening when genes encoding OPCs were exposed to heroin, the scientists overexpressed them in addicted laboratory animals using viral gene therapy.

The result was surprising: When either of the two genes, SOX10 or BRG1, was overexpressed, the animals’ motivation to take the drug was reduced.

“To our surprise, it reduced their drug-taking behavior,” says Dietz. “It looks like the brain is trying to reconnect and possibly re-adapt myelin to normalize function, although that would need to be directly tested in future studies.”

One way to think of what may be happening, he explained, is to imagine that the brain is responding to exposure to drugs of abuse by attempting to reconnect with the brain’s other reward centers.

“As with any part of the body that sustains an insult, it seems that the addicted brain is trying to fix what went wrong,” he says.

“Our hypothesis is that after exposure to heroin, the brain starts to activate OPCs in an attempt to fix the altered connectivity that occurs in the addicted states. It is possible that when we facilitated OPCs, we may have reversed some of the disconnect between the prefrontal cortex and the brain’s other reward regions.”