Anti-obesity, anti-cocaine drugs one in the same?

New drug development is long (~8-10+ yrs) and costly (~1 billion), so repurposing drugs that are already FDA approved can be an effective strategy for effective therapeutics. With this in mind, energy-dense 'tasty' food activates reward centers in the brain akin to some drugs of abuse including cocaine.

With this in mind, researchers have begun to look at the hormones, neurotransmitters, and receptors that regulate food (over)consumption and experimentally manipulate them to try and affect cocaine-related behaviors. Honestly, this idea is decades old, but this recent paper by Hernandez et al. (2018) examines the neuropeptide, Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1)receptor in cocaine relapse behavior. Activating the GLP-1 receptor effectively reduced cocaine relapse when primed with a cocaine injection and also reduced cocaine relapse when cocaine-cues were presented to invigorate cocaine seeking.  The best part is that the doses tested did not affect food consumption or make the experimental animals experience motor side effects.

The immunohistochemistry analysis indicated that the GLP-1 receptor is expressed in the ventral tegmental area, a brain nucleus that is important for rewarding behaviors, which led researchers to stimulate the GLP-1 receptors in the ventral tegmental area to try and suppress cocaine relapse. Their hypothesis was supported and by activating GLP-1 receptors in the VTA cocaine relapse behavior was reduced.

These findings are very interesting and because there is a GLP-1 agonist already FDA-approved for Type 2 diabetes, 

GLP-1 agonists may offer expedited help to people suffering from addiction and clinicians looking to help reduce relapse rates.

Full access to the paper can be found here.