This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the federal Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279), will provide $231,000 to the University of Rochester to conduct research on the pharmacological properties of the drug xylazine and its metabolites. The key objectives are to determine if xylazine and its metabolites act as agonists, antagonists, or positive allosteric modulators at the mu and kappa opioid receptors, as well as the sigma 1 and sigma...
This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279), provides $238,500 to the University of Pittsburgh to conduct research on the effects of xylazine and opioids on prefrontal cortex inhibitory transmission. The research aims to understand xylazine's cell signaling profiles and interactions with opioids at the circuit level, as xylazine is becoming highly prevalent in illicit opioid supplies and poses an...
This Project Grant award of $147,486 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) will fund two multi-method studies to characterize the impact of the veterinary tranquilizer xylazine on people who use drugs (PWUD) in North Carolina and Maine. The first study in North Carolina aims to describe PWUD's perceptions, experiences, and the impacts of xylazine, including related complications like wounds and overdoses, through surveys...
This $387,750 Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) will support research by Mercer University to investigate the molecular pharmacology of the drug xylazine and its effects on adrenoceptors. The research aims to assess xylazine's binding affinity and functional profiles at different adrenoceptor subtypes expressed in vascular smooth muscle cells, as well as directly test the hypothesis that...
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) awarded a $907,500 Project Grant under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) to Tufts University School of Medicine. The grant, titled "Examination of Xylazine Exposure and the Risk of Skin and Soft Tissue Infections in People Who Inject Drugs," will fund a 3-year study to prospectively recruit 200 people who inject drugs (PWID) in Lowell, Massachusetts and examine the association between xylazine exposure and the...
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) awarded a $856,055 Project Grant under CFDA 93.279 - Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs to The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA). The grant, awarded on September 15, 2024, will fund research to improve understanding of the interactions between opioids and the veterinary drug xylazine, which has seen a marked rise in use as an adulterant in opioids leading to increased overdoses. The proposed studies aim to...
This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279), provides $506,000.00 to the Scripps Research Institute to prepare and investigate monoclonal antibodies that can block the mechanism of action and adverse effects of the drug xylazine. Xylazine has been increasingly detected as an adulterant in illicit drug mixtures and is linked to a growing number of overdose deaths. The research aims to generate a...
This federal Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279), provides $237,750 to Temple University to conduct research on the effects of xylazine on methamphetamine-induced behavioral alterations in rats. The key objectives are to evaluate how xylazine impacts methamphetamine self-administration, reinforcing efficacy, seeking behaviors, and associated molecular biomarkers in the nucleus accumbens. This...
This Project Grant award, with an ID of R21DA061281, was provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279). The $266,742 grant will fund a two-year qualitative study to characterize transitions to low-frequency injecting and injection cessation among people using xylazine-adulterated fentanyl in Connecticut. The study aims to (1) understand how exposure to xylazine-adulterated fentanyl intersects with social-structural...
This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the federal Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279), will support a mixed methods study to develop a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm to identify patients exposed to the veterinary sedative xylazine, which has become an emerging threat during the U.S. opioid crisis. The total award of $146,922 will fund in-depth interviews with people who use drugs and medical providers in Rhode Island to...
This Project Grant award for $423,708 was provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279). The funding will support research to investigate the effects of fentanyl-xylazine drug mixtures on cardiorespiratory function and subjective effects in rats. Specifically, the research aims to characterize how xylazine impacts fentanyl-induced changes in heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and respiration, as well as determine if xylazine intensifies the interoceptive-stimulus effects of fentanyl. The project will also test whether the effects of fentanyl-xylazine are reversed by co-administration of the opioid antagonist naloxone and the alpha-2 receptor antagonist atipamezole. This research seeks to identify the receptor targets mediating the desirable and harmful effects of fentanyl-xylazine mixtures, which could inform the development of effective overdose rescue medications and treatments for fentanyl-xylazine misuse. The award was granted to the RU School of Osteopathic Medicine, a state-controlled institution of higher learning in New Jersey, and has an ultimate completion date of September 29, 2026.