Interactions of Delta-9 Tetrahydrocannabinol
July 11, 2024, 1:00 PM
Dr. Weerts is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and core faculty in the preclinical Division of Behavioral Biology (DBB) the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit (BPRU) for human clinical and laboratory research. She has over 25 years of experience conducting behavioral pharmacology, drug pharmacokinetics and neuroimaging research in both laboratory animals and human volunteers. Dr. Weerts has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2001, and cannabis/cannabinoids are a main focus of her current research. She has conducted multiple behavioral pharmacology studies comparing the effects of cannabis and isolated cannabinoids administered via different routes of administration on conditioned reward, pain sensitivity, inflammation, anxiety-like behaviors and cognition. Dr. Weerts has refined and validated methodologies for rodent THC vapor exposure using e-vape technology with concurrent pharmacokinetic analyses to establish parameters for THC vapor exposure sufficient to produce significant plasma concentrations of cannabinoids in rats that were comparable to those in human laboratory studies. Her recent PET imaging study in human volunteers was one of the first to demonstrate changes in the cannabinoid receptor type 1 (CB1R) associated with regular cannabis use in women and reveal differences in CB1R availability in healthy men and women who do not use cannabis. Dr. Weerts has served on multiple study sections for NIH institutes (NIDA, NIAAA and CSR) as a section member and as Chair., and also serves on the Editorial Boards for several journals including Addiction Biology, Pharmacology Biochemistry and behavior, and Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology.