1/1 INIA Stress and Chronic Alcohol Interactions: Administrative Resource

PROJECT SUMMARY The consortium Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism: Stress and Chronic Alcohol Interactions (a.k.a. INIAstress) is a collection of highly integrative and innovative projects and cores. The overarching goal of INIAstress is elucidating the changes in brain circuitry and mechanisms that underlie how chronic alcohol alters response to stress, which in turn can facilitate the transition from moderate/social drinking to heavy/hazardous drinking and associated problems. The consortium has defined factors that contribute to an individual's risk for the development of alcohol use disorder (AUD), revealed underlying mechanisms and conditions that promote excessive and harmful drinking, and forged progress towards discovering more effective and tailored treatment strategies. In the next renewal, the overarching goal of the INIAstress Consortium is to apply cutting-edge technologies towards elucidating mechanisms of neural adaptation in key brain circuitry that underlie how alcohol and stress interact to facilitate a trajectory toward excessive drinking, a negative emotional state, cognitive (executive) function deficits, and harmful abstinence/relapse cycles. Through this knowledge the consortium will advance personalized medicine approaches to facilitate recovery from AUD and, in particular, stress-related excessive alcohol consumption. Collectively, these collaborative, cross-species studies directly integrate behavioral, endocrine, neural, and genetic data within a scope of expertise and thematic inquiry that would not be possible using more traditional grant mechanisms. As the lead application, the Administrative Resource Core will provide scientific leadership on the consortium's main goals and serve as a centralized administrative structure to facilitate and coordinate the overall management, direction and integration of research activities within the INIAstress Consortium.