Jon Pierce-Shimomura, UT Austin – Treating Alcoholism with Worm Experiments

Academic research sometimes takes scientists into unforeseen places.

Today on The Academic Minute, Jon Pierce-Shimomura, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin, discusses his research aimed at treating alcoholism through the intoxication of worms.

Jon Pierce-Shimomura, assistant professor in the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at The University of Texas at Austin. During his graduate career at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Dr. Pierce-Shimomura studied the mechanisms for chemotaxis and taste discrimination in the nematode C. elegans with Dr. Shawn Lockery. He then switched to a more medically relevant topic — studying the molecular basis for intoxication by alcohol as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. His work is on-going at the Pierce-Shimomura Lab.

Treating Alcoholism with Worm Experiments

Imagine a special serum that gives you superhuman abilities to drink your opponents under the table while staying completely sober yourself.

Research from my lab might someday make such a drug possible.

Super-powers aside, our main interest is to help alcoholics overcome addiction and cope with withdrawal. As an unlikely first step, we’ve discovered a way to create mutant worms that resist the effects of alcohol. These worms can’t get drunk.

So how do we know if a worm is drunk? The worms in question, Caenorhabditis elegans, typically model intoxication by crawling more slowly and wriggling less. Inebriated worms also stop laying eggs. Eggs build up in their bodies where they are easy to count. 

Although people obviously aren’t worms, the nervous systems of worm and man are composed of the same molecules. When drunk, here’s what’s happening at the molecular level: Alcohol sticks to a molecule on a brain cell—like a key fitting into a lock. When alcohol binds this target, it triggers the cell to respond in ways that we associate with intoxication.

Worms genetically engineered to carry a modified human alcohol target – essentially jamming the alcohol “lock” – showed none of the usual signs of having had too much alcohol. Luckily, the mutation of this particular modified target, called the BK channel, only affects its response to alcohol. That means no disruption to other important functions that the channel typically regulates, such as activities in the respiratory tract, neurons, blood vessels and bladder.

Alcohol’s effects on the body are complex, though, and have many targets across the brain. That means more research will be needed to find out whether the mutation affects tolerance, craving, withdrawal and other relevant human symptoms that can’t be measured in worms. But eventually the alcohol-blocking mutation surprisingly discovered in the worms might lead to a drug that would help alcoholics and counteract the intoxicating and potentially addictive effects of alcohol.

Read More: UTA News: Mutation Stops Worms From Getting Drunk