Alcohol and other substance use disorders are prevalent, disabling, and impose enormous medical, psychosocial and economic burden. While our neuroscientific understanding of addition has considerably expanded in the last decades, pharmacotherapeutic options remain limited and not all patients respond to available medications. Compared to de novo drug discovery which typically has low success rates, especially in neuropsychiatry and addiction, drug repurposing focuses on compounds with known drug safety and early efficacy signals from animal models and/or preliminary human studies. Derived from recent advances in understanding the neurobiology of alcohol use and related behaviors, this presentation will provide examples of translational drug repurposing efforts, including preclinical experiments and on-going clinical trials with mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists (e.g. Spironolactone) and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (e.g. semaglutide) as potential novel pharmacotherapies for alcohol use disorder.

After hearing from this expert on the latest developments, you will be able to:

1. Portray the current landscape of pharmacotherapies to treat patients with alcohol and other substance use disorders; and,

2. Describe the significance of translational research and drug repurposing to facilitate medication development for addictions and give examples of ongoing neuroscience-informed drug repurposing efforts to develop novel pharmacotherapies for alcohol use disorder.