Dr. Bernard Le Foll is a Clinician Scientist specializing in Addiction. He is Chair of Addiction Psychiatry within the Department of Psychiatry of University of Toronto. He is Head of the Translational Addiction Research Laboratory in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute. He is also the Lead, Clinical Research Innovation Service within the Addiction Division at CAMH. He is Head of the Alcohol Research and Treatment Clinic at CAMH. He is Professor at University of Toronto in the departments of Family and Community Medicine, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Psychiatry ,Institute of Medical Sciences and Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Areas of Research
Dr. Le Foll received specialized training in drug addiction and behavioral and cognitive therapy at Paris University in France. He has written treatment guidelines and has been coordinator of clinical trials. He obtained a PhD in pharmacology at INSERM and completed a Post-doctoral Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. He has received scientific prizes and awards from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the National Institutes of Health, the French Academy of Medicine, the American College for Neuropsychopharmacology, the College on Problems on Drug Dependence, the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, the Brain and Behavior Foundation, Pfizer, OPGRC, the Ontario Lung Association and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
A large focus in the last few years has been to integrate research in the clinical settings and to lead multi-disciplinary research teams.
The main goal of the research is to improve treatment of drug addiction. For this purpose, several clinical trials and lab-based studies have been implemented to test novel treatment interventions for various substance use disorders. Various drugs of abuse (cannabis, alcohol, tobacco, opiates) are being studied.
Several studies have been implemented to study the negative impact of cannabis (for ex, addictive potential, impact on driving abilities) and the possible positive impact (studying the medical potential of cannabis).
The impact of substance use is also studied with basic research approaches (notably brain imaging) and epidemiological studies in large cohorts of subjects.
Publications
View Dr. Le Foll's publications on PubMed.