UTHealth Houston researchers awarded $3 million to develop novel cocaine addiction treatment

UTHealth Houston researchers awarded $3 million to develop novel cocaine addiction treatment

Written by: Catherine Marfin | Updated: October 02, 2025

A $3.1 million grant awarded to UTHealth Houston by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health, will allow researchers to work toward developing a novel treatment for cocaine addiction that combines a behavioral intervention with a brain stimulation treatment to target areas of the brain that are affected in addiction.

Co-principal investigators of the study are Joy M. Schmitz, PhD, professor and director of the Center for Neurobehavioral Research on Addiction in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston; Heather Webber, PhD, assistant professor at the Center for Neurobehavioral Research on Addiction; and Elliot Hong, MD, the Stephen Brannan, MD, Distinguished Professor in Clinical Methodology and director of the Houston Psychosis Research Center in the Faillace Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

The trio said they chose to focus their research on cocaine addiction because of the lack of Food and Drug Administration-approved medications to treat the disease.

"Cocaine addiction is a serious relapsing brain disorder with significant personal and public health consequences, yet effective treatment options remain limited," said Schmitz, who is the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Louis A. Faillace, MD, Distinguished Professor at McGovern Medical School. "Given recent advances in our understanding of its neurobiology, it is now critically important to leverage these insights to develop more effective, targeted interventions."

Cocaine addiction, also known as cocaine use disorder, affects about 1.4 million people in the United States, according to the2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. In the absence of FDA-approved interventions, cocaine addiction is primarily treated through behavioral therapies, including one known as contingency management, which uses positive reinforcement to motivate and promote behavioral changes.

"Overall, contingency management [CM1] works, but not perfectly and not for everyone," Schmitz said. "This grant is focused on improving contingency management to achieve higher rates of responding."

Over four years, UTHealth Houston researchers will use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a neuromodulation method which uses magnetic pulses, to target the brain circuits associated with addiction - specifically, the lateral prefrontal cortex and anterior insula - in order to develop a treatment that complements contingency management techniques.

The study will initially enroll 130 individuals with cocaine use disorder, who will receive contingency management therapy during the first four weeks of the study. Participants who do not initially respond will then undergo eight weeks of TMS in addition to contingency management.

Based on prior studies, researchers expect that about two-thirds of the initial participants will not respond, or fail to abstain from cocaine use for at least two weeks.

To deliver magnetic stimulation to these participants, researchers will use a TMS device that is worn like a helmet to target deeper areas of the brain

"The most exciting part is now there are newer technologies and techniques that can target those brain circuits that have been dysregulated and improve them in a way that might lead to better outcomes," Schmitz said.

This project is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under award number 1U01DA064181-01.