Fentanyl—Not Just the Next Wave of the Opioid Crisis—The Next Tsunami!
Dr. Lukas joined McLean Hospital in 1984 and is currently the Director of the McLean Imaging Center, the Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory, and the McLean Sleep Diagnostic and Treatment Laboratory. He is Professor of Psychiatry (Pharmacology) at Harvard Medical School and has 42 years of experience conducting both preclinical and human laboratory studies as well as randomized clinical trials of drugs for alcohol abuse, sleep disorders, and psychiatric disorders using a variety of imaging modalities (EEG, MRI, fMRI, MRS).
He has studied alternative therapies such as electroacupuncture, Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation (CES), and herbal preparations such as the Chinese/Japanese plant kudzu for alcohol abuse. He has been the PI or Co-PI of 18 industry sponsored clinical trials, two-dozen NIDA and NIAAA funded R01, R21 and R03 grants and is the PI/training director of a NIDA T32 training Grant that is currently in its
19 th year. He also held a NIDA K02 Award for 10 years and the senior K05 Award for 12 years.
Dr. Lukas’ research interests are the neurobiological basis of drug and alcohol addiction,
including imaging, pharmacokinetics, polydrug abuse, sex-differences, complementary and
alternative medicine, and medication development. He uses actigraphy and various imaging
technologies to measure changes in brain function that reflect consciousness, sleep,
performance, mood states, and reward after drug administration or drug-related cues in adults
and adolescents. He has studied a number of different drugs of abuse, including cocaine,
marihuana, alcohol, opiates, nicotine, and how they interact with one another. In addition, he
has developed medications to treat drug and alcohol abuse/dependence. Dr. Lukas has also
explored sex differences in the response to cocaine as well as the interactions when multiple
drugs are combined. He has used cue-reactivity methods to monitor changes in drug craving,
including the first study to use fMRI to study cocaine cue reactivity and a recently completed a
study using MR technologies to monitor changes in brain GABA and glutamate levels as
individuals undergo abstinence from cocaine. He is currently conducting a Phase II clinical trial
of kudzu extract for treating alcohol use disorder in treatment seeking individuals. He is also the
lead scientist on a contract in collaboration with the National Highway Transportation Safety
Administration to test novel prototype devices that passively detect alcohol in the breath and
under the skin of drivers. He is also the lead scientist developing a novel band aid-like device
that detects alcohol in interstitial fluid and sends the results to a Smartphone and in a separate
initiative is testing a device that measures THC in breath. He is the current holder of two
patents, both of which have been licensed and one is now commercialized as an herbal
treatment for alcohol use. He has served two terms on the Board of Directors of the College on
Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) and served as president from 2011-2012. He also
chaired the CPDD Program Committee for 5 years, Chaired NIDA-K Study Section for 10 years
and was Chair of the McLean Hospital Institutional Review Board for 4 years. He has mentored
26 NIH K Awardees and 24 postdoctoral fellows and has received numerous awards including
the CPDD MENTORSHIP AWARD, THE STUART HAUSER MENTORSHIP AWARD from Harvard Medical School, both the ANN CATALDO MENTORSHIP and JACK H. MENDELSON RESEARCH AWARDS from McLean Hospital and the PETRA T. SHATTUCK EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING AWARD from Harvard University where he has been teaching a course at Harvard University entitled Psychopharmacology—Your Brain on Drugs Psychology since 1996.
