🧠💊 How we went drug-shopping for opioid addiction… using genomes

Opioid use disorder (OUD) has few effective medications, in part because psychiatric drug development is slow and costly. In this study, we took a different approach by asking whether existing FDA-approved drugs could be repurposed for OUD using human biology as our guide. We integrated large-scale human genetic data (GWAS), post-mortem human brain gene expression, and protein interaction networks to identify genes consistently implicated in OUD risk and neurobiology.

We then matched those biologically supported genes to known drug targets using multiple drug-repurposing databases, prioritizing compounds with convergent evidence while filtering out non-specific or well-established opioid targets. This integrative, genome-driven framework identified a refined set of candidate drugs and demonstrates how human genomics can directly inform translational discovery for OUD treatment, without starting drug development from scratch.