Medications Discovery: Importance of Assessment of Drug Self Administration Dose-Effect Curves

There are several procedures for assessment of abuse liability/potential in laboratory animals. Among them is an intravenous (IV) drug self-administration procedure that is the gold standard. For example, the IV drug self-administration procedure has high face, predictive and construct validities [1,2]. In addition, the procedure also has lower rates of false positives and negatives, relative to other procedures [2,3]. For these reasons, the procedure has been employed for assessment of various compounds for abuse potential in humans. For example, drugs abused by humans (cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and ketamine) maintain self-administration responding above vehicle levels in rats [4,5]. When such a response is maintained above vehicle levels in laboratory animals, a test compound would likely be reinforcing and have abuse potential in humans.