by Bill Snyder
Innovative strategies for addressing the nation’s opioid epidemic and its consequences will be discussed during a Cutting-edge Discovery Lecture on Sept. 13. The lecture will begin at 4 p.m. in room 208 Light Hall.
Carrie Jones, PhD, assistant professor of Pharmacology and director of In Vivo and Translational Pharmacology in the Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, will discuss the “development of M5 muscarinic acetylcholine receptor negative allosteric modulators for the treatment of opioid use disorder.”
She will be joined by Stephen Patrick, MD, MPH, MS, assistant professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Child Health Policy. He is a national expert on neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), withdrawal symptoms that can occur in newborns exposed to opioids in the womb.
Patrick previously served as Senior Science Policy Advisor to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and has testified before Congress on the rising numbers of newborns being diagnosed with opioid withdrawal after birth.
Part of the Flexner Discovery Lecture Series, their talks are sponsored by Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD, Executive Vice President for Research in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Lawrence Marnett, PhD, Dean of Basic Sciences in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
For a complete schedule of the Flexner Discovery Lecture series and archived video of previous lectures, go to www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/discoveryseries.