Abstract #1224

De Novo Buprenorphine Phmri Effects in Conscious Rats Parallels Brain Activation in Humans

Lino Becerra^1,2, Pei-Ching Chang¹, James Bishop¹, Jaymin Upadhyay¹, Julie Anderson¹, Gautam Pendse¹, Smriti Iyengar³, Alexandre Coimbra⁴, Richard Baumgartner⁴, Adam Schwarz³, Jeffrey Evelhoch⁴, Erci Nisenbaum³, Brigitte Robertson⁵, Thomas Large⁵, David Bleakman³, Richard Hargreaves⁴, David Borsook^1,2

¹Imaging Consortium for Drug Development, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA, United States; ²A A Martinos Center for Biomed. Imaging, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; ³Eli Lilly and Co., Indianapolis, IN, United States; ⁴Merck and Co, West Point, PA, United States; ⁵Sepracor Inc., Marlborough, MA, United States

fMRI studies of rodents are confounded by the use of anesthetics, especially for the study of analgesics. Furthermore, there are no studies comparing pharmacological brain effects in humans and rodents of the same analgesics. In this work, we present results of pharmacological MRI (phMRI) of an opioid analgesic (buprenorphine) in conscious rats and compare the brain activations with results obtained in humans. Although brain structure and function differ between humans and rodents, some parallelism does exist and this thesis underpins much pre-clinical research. Translational results as presented here have the potential to bridge pre-clinical with clinical imaging studies.