The Yale Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science (TCORS) will continue to investigate how flavours and sweeteners influence the appeal of tobacco products after a USD 20 million (EUR 17 million) government grant was renewed, Yale School of Medicine said in a press release.

The renewed grant from the National Institutes of Health and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will allow TCORS to continue its research on the role flavours play in the appeal and addictive potential of combustible tobacco products but also new products such as e-cigarettes.
TCORS was established at Yale University in 2013 under a five-year federal grant of USD 20 million to provide science-based findings to the FDA. The agency’s further regulation of flavours in tobacco products will be informed by the research conducted at Yale, which now has funding secured for an additional five-year period, the press release said.
TCORS will conduct three new research projects with the new grant. Project 1 will examine how preconditioning to flavours and sweeteners influences nicotine use and addiction, including the influence of novel cooling agents, which the press release noted could replace menthol. Project 2 will look at how sweet and cool flavours influence the use of tobacco products among youths and will evaluate whether sweet and cool flavours impact nicotine reward and switching behaviours in both younger and older smokers. Project 3 will seek to determine optimal nicotine delivery rates to relieve nicotine withdrawal and how delivery rates are influenced or altered among smokers switching from mentholated to non-mentholated products.