N.Y. research team discovers how antidepressants and cocaine interact with brain ce...( NEW YORK (July 28 2008) -- In a firs...)

NEW YORK (July 28, 2008) -- In a first, scientists from Weill Cornell Medical College and Columbia University Medical Center have described the specifics of how brain cells process antidepressant drugs, cocaine and amphetamines. These novel findings could prove useful in the development of more targeted medication therapies for a host of psychiatric diseases, most notably in the area of addiction.

Their breakthrough research, featured as the cover story in a recent issue of Molecular Cell, describes the precise molecular and biochemical structure of drug targets known as neurotransmitter-sodium symporters (NSSs), and how cells use them to enable neural signaling in the brain. A second study, published in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience, pinpoints where the drug molecules bind in the neurotransmitter transporter -- their target in the human nervous system.

"These findings are so clear and detailed at the level of molecular behavior that they will be most valuable to developing more effective therapies for mood disorders and neurologic and psychiatric diseases, and to direct effective treatments for drug addiction to cocaine and amphetamines," says co-lead author Dr. Harel Weinstein, Chairman and Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, and director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. "This research may also open the door to the development of new therapies for dopamine-neurotransmitter disorders such as Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, and anxiety and depression."

To make their observations, the research team led by Dr. Jonathan Javitch, senior author of the Molecular Cell study and contributing author to the Nature Neuroscience study, and professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology in the Center for Molecular Recognition at Columbia University Medical Center, stabilized different structural states of the neurotransmitter-sodium-symporter molecule that r
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