On Mar. 8, 2012, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) awarded a five-year, $21 million Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism grant to support a multi-site consortium led by an Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) researcher.

OHSU received approximately $6.3 million over five years, funding projects in the laboratories of Kathleen A. Grant, Ph.D., head of neuroscience at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) and professor of behavioral neuroscience in the OHSU School of Medicine; and Betsy Ferguson, Ph.D., associate scientist in neuroscience at the ONPRC.

The consortium, Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism: Stress, Anxiety and Alcoholism, or INIAstress, extends a cross species approach in exploring neural mechanisms that link stress, anxiety and excessive alcohol intake.

Alcoholism affects millions of Americans, devastates families, compromises national preparedness, depresses economic vitality, and burdens the country’s health care systems. Untreated addiction costs America $400 billion annually and recent research indicates that alcoholism and alcohol abuse alone cost the nation’s economy approximately $185 billion each year, according to NIAAA-funded research.

The consortium’s main approach will be to characterize the genetic basis of key neural mechanisms in stress and anxiety in order to clearly assess individual risk for the development of alcoholism or to develop tailored therapeutic approaches to treating the anxious alcoholic.”