Alex French Lab
The French lab studies how psychedelics and alcohol alter the brain in order to understand how psychedelics can be repurposed into treatments for alcohol use disorder.
Alcohol use disorder
is the leading risk factor for death and disability around the world in people 15-49 years old. In the US, nearly 1 in 10 people 12 and older qualified for AUD at some point in in the past year. Alcohol misuse costs the American economy nearly $249 billion annually. Source: NIAAA
Psychedelics
Long-referenced as trippy drugs from the '60s, psychedelics are now known to be powerful molecules that promote rewiring of neural connections in the brain. This rewiring is thought to contribute to psychedelics' success in recent clinical trials for mitigating alcohol misuse.
Signal transduction
Is a key step in how the body amplifies the effects of small molecular events - such as drug binding - into processes large enough to change a whole animal's behavior.
Our goal
Understand how the signal transduction of psychedelics can be rewired to maximize the medicinal benefit of psychedelics, without hallucinations.
