Dopamine receptor partial agonists could address the duality of cocaine craving

Profound drug desire ('craving') is a cardinal feature of addiction. Craving has often been a target for development of medications because it can trigger relapse, a defining - as well as painful and extremely expensive - feature of the addictive disorders. Despite an intensive search for specific drug therapies since the mid 1980s, there is still no uniformly effective medication for human cocaine craving and there are no medications that are able to prevent cocaine relapse. Recently, Pilla et al. demonstrated that BP897, which is a partial agonist at dopamine (DA) D3 receptors, curtails cocaine-seeking in rats in the presence of cocaine cues. These results suggest that such DA receptor partial agonists could offer a novel strategy for modulation of DA transmitter systems in the CNS - the systems that are implicated most frequently in cocaine craving.