smoking cessation

Many friends and family have asked "exactly what does Ryan work on at Caltech?" Thankfully someone else was able to put it into terms the rest of us can understand. Read on.

The Caltech homepage headlines Ryan's lab with the research grant they are working under. It says (for those of you who don't get to it via the link above):

New Drugs for Smoking Cessation to Be the Target of Grant-Funded Partnership
The California Institute of Technology has been awarded a five-year grant for $4.6 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop a program for discovering medications aimed either at helping people avoid nicotine addiction or at helping smokers to quit. The project will include researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder and from Targacept, a North Carolina-based biopharmaceutical company whose scientists are leaders in research focused on a class of receptors known as neuronal nicotinic receptors.

Pretty cool in my opinion. It is nice to know that all his hard work is worthwhile in the grand scheme of research and hopefully will lend to helping others someday. In fact, one of the driving factors in Ryan's interest in this field is the prevalence of smoking and smoking related health problems in both of our families. It is so unfortunate how much research actually goes into making cigarettes MORE addictive, and thankfully there is counterbalanced research efforts for people wanting to quit. I'm proud to say that my husband is working on one of those efforts.