The third aim will establish infrastructure to accelerate addiction research beyond the center itself. PARC will expand its addiction biobank, which currently contains more than 40,000 specimens collected from studies of addiction-related behaviors involving cocaine, oxycodone and alcohol. The biobank has already supported 75 external research projects.
PARC will also provide researchers with access to standardized behavioral models, computational tools and shared datasets. Data will be made available through National Institutes of Health repositories to support reproducibility and enable other researchers to build on the center’s findings.
The center builds on six years of collaboration among UC San Diego addiction researchers. During that time, PARC investigators have worked across more than a dozen laboratories, producing hundreds of publications and developing shared research resources. The new NIDA-funded Center will formalize and expand that collaborative model, with the goal of creating a national resource for addiction science.
By bringing alcohol and drug research together and connecting biological information across multiple levels, PARC aims to move addiction research from isolated observations toward a more integrated understanding of why addiction develops, why some people are more vulnerable than others and why relapse occurs.
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