WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senators Susan Collins and Angus King today announced that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded a five-year grant to Jackson Laboratory that is expected to total $11,714,623 to create a new Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction. The center will study traits in mice that might predispose them to drug addiction, and use its findings to better understand and combat human addiction.

“With the heroin and opioid crisis devastating communities throughout our country, it is critical that we build a better understanding of the science behind addiction,” Senators Collins and King said in a joint statement. “The Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction will provide critical insights in the battle against the drug epidemic, and we commend Jackson Laboratory for its commitment to this important mission.”

The Center for Systems Neurogenetics of Addiction (CSNA) will enlist the help of behavioral neuroscientists, computational biologists and geneticists to study the behavior of a wide variation of laboratory mice to better understand any predisposition to addiction. They will then correlate these traits with the genomes of the mice to build datasets in order to help unravel mechanisms of human addiction.

This grant provides $2,587,082 in funding for the 2016-2017 budget period as part of the five-year project supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one of 27 institutes and centers that combine to form the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Senators Collins and King are members of the Senate NIH Caucus.

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