For Charles Nichols, a typical day at work involves a hefty dose of hallucinogens, thousands of flies and frozen rat brains.
Nichols and his father are tag-team researchers exploring the effects of mind-bending drugs on schizophrenia.
Nichols, associate professor of pharmacology at the LSU Health Sciences Center, researches the relationship between drugs like LSD and the mental disorder.
His father, David Nichols, is a Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology at Purdue University. David Nichols doses rats with LSD every other day for three months to develop a model of psychosis of schizophrenia.
After he takes the rats on their three-month-long trips, he euthanizes them and extracts their brains. He then mails the frozen brains to his son for further research.
“The heart of it is LSD or schizophrenia has the ability to change how someone views reality,” Charles Nichols said.
He said hallucinogenic drugs affect the same parts of the brain as schizophrenia, so understanding how drugs like LSD operate can give clues to how schizophrenia works.
Charles Nichols said the practical benefits of his research would be to develop a new drug to treat the disorder.
He said after the rats receive the prolonged LSD treatment, their behaviors change permanently. The rats become more aggressive and hyperreactive and show other symptoms similar to those of schizophrenia. He said he and his father aren’t sure whether the rats have trips.
“Normal rats like sugar water, but LSD rats don’t have a preference,” David Nichols said.
Charles Nichols said he learned from the rats which genes are affected and is now testing gene expression in fruit flies. He uses the flies because it is easier to turn on and off gene receptors.
His lab in the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans is filled with glass tubes spotted with thousands of fruit flies. The lab is equipped with makeshift testing areas and fly traps to catch escapees.
Charles tests the effects of hallucinogens on the flies’ visual perception by putting them in a spinning cylinder tube with a black stripe. A normal fly will follow the stripe, but a treated fly does not.
He studies aggression by placing two treated male flies together and watching the levels of aggression while they fight.
Affected fruit flies struggle with vision perception, aggression, memory problems, difficulty learning and are less likely to mate, he said.
After the battery of tests, Charles sedates the fly before examining its brain.
“LSD doesn’t just affect the brain. It affects hormones and the immune system,” he said.
He said LSD and drugs related to it have potent anti-inflammatory effects — something he observed randomly in the lab. He is now looking at the anti-inflammatory effects of four other hallucinogens provided by pharmaceutical companies for research.
Charles received a $350,000 grant for two years from the National Institute of Health in July to begin his research on the anti-inflammatory effects.
He uses tissue cells and cultured animal cells in hopes of one day making a drug based on hallucinogens that will be an intense anti-inflammatory.
He said the Drug Enforcement Agency monitors his work closely. The DEA randomly checks his lab books to make sure everything matches up and is accounted for. All drugs are locked in a safe in his office.
—-
Contact Celeste Ansley at [email protected]