Title:

Imaging and Modeling of Dopamine Transporter Trafficking in Drug Abuse

Speaker:

Dr. Jonathon Nye

Affiliation:

Emory University

When:

Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:00:00 AM   Add to Calendar

Where:

Boggs Building, Room 3-47, 3rd FL

Host:

Dr. Lei Zhu
leizhu@gatech.edu
(404) 385-3882

Abstract

The objective of his seminar is to describe the role of PET in studying brain responses to drugs and drugs of abuse. Dr. Nye will present an imaging technique to measure the rapid regulation of cell-surface expressed dopamine transporters following acute exposure to cocaine. The effects of cocaine on acute transporter regulation occur on a time scale proportional to the pharmacological delivery in brain (few seconds to minutes). Dr. Nye will be presenting preliminary results employing neuroimaging and microdialysis techniques to measure these changes in a rodent model.

Biography

Jonathon Nye is an assistant professor of Radiation and Imaging Sciences at Emory University. He is a faculty member of Emory's Center for Systems Imaging (CSI), a cross-disciplinary scientific, administrative, and educational home for imaging science at Emory University. Over the past 6 years Dr. Nye's research efforts have focused on radioisotope production methodologies and the incorporation of positron emitting isotopes into pharmaceuticals for use in positron emission tomography (PET). The technologies developed in this work have greatly improved the availability of short and long-lived PET precursors that permit the monitoring of physiological processes on the order of minutes to days. His current research interests involve the development of new PET imaging tracers and the evaluation of their physiological behavior in vivo with quantitative kinetic modeling. Dr. Nye is particularly interested in developing new kinetic models to estimate monoamine transporter occupancy in brain using a single radiopharmaceutical injection with drug challenge.