The Dopamine Receptor D1(DRD1) as a target for Developinga Therapy for Cocaine Addiction

Abstract

It takes approximately fifteen years and nearly one billion dollars to bring a drug to market. A computational approach shows promise in being used to find therapeutics in less time and cost-effectively [1]. The approach reported herein mines publicly available gene expression data to uncover a gene is up or down regulated from microarray experiments and may lead to the repurposing of a current Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drug to help cure cocaine addiction. Publicly available data from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/) was used. Data sets were downloaded to uncover the gene expression difference between saline and cocaine-treated rats and the top genes analyzed. The secondary analysis included the correlation with FDA-approved drug gene expression data found on the Broad Institute’s Connectivity Map (CMap: https://clue.io/cmap) website. This resulted in the identification of compounds that antagonize the dopamine receptor D1(DRD1).