Novel Approaches to Phenotyping Drug Abuse

The summary for the Novel Approaches to Phenotyping Drug Abuse grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Novel Approaches to Phenotyping Drug Abuse: The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) requests applications that propose and evaluate novel approaches to understanding the drug abuse phenotype(s). Specifically, the purpose of this initiative is to support innovative studies that better describe, discriminate, and predict the complex nature and course of drug abuse so as to offer more precise phenotypic indicators for testing the hypothesized underlying genetic and environmental risks for drug abuse. The term "drug abuse" as used in this RFA refers broadly to several different but related concepts including drug abuse and drug dependence as defined by diagnostic criteria, as well as drug involvement, hazardous drug use, drug seeking behavior, and the like. While it is recognized that these concepts may not be interchangeable, the term drug abuse is used for the purposes of fluency. The term "drug" refers primarily to cannabis, cocaine, opiates, nicotine, but also includes the entire range of substances of abuse. Like other common human diseases, drug abuse is considered a "complex" disorder that reflects the interplay between underlying genetic susceptibility and environmental risk. Despite the real promise of molecular genetics, there has been limited success in reliably identifying specific susceptibility genes for drug abuse. Although this difficulty is often attributed to genetic heterogeneity, attaining greater clarity of the phenotypic heterogeneity of drug abuse looms large as a major challenge for the field. Ultimately, the successful identification of specific genes and related mechanisms, underlying physiologic systems, and other etiological processes hinges on precise and specific phenotypic definitions and greater understanding of how such phenotypes influence and are shaped by environmental factors, developmental course, and individual characteristics. Although researchers and treatment providers acknowledge that drug abuse is diverse, complex, and dynamic, such knowledge has not been well integrated into research, treatment, and prevention strategies. For example, while extant research conceptualizes drug abuse as a heterogeneous and dynamic construct, most analytic approaches operationalize drug abuse as a dichotomous and static outcome, and consider as covariates (or even statistical error) factors that may represent critical clues about drug abuse etiology, treatment, prevention and, ultimately, genomic search strategies.