APS E-News | Advocacy Update Report | December 2018
NIH Announces HEAL Initiative Funding Opportunities
Through some 30 new funding opportunities within the Helping to End Addiction Long-Term (HEAL) Initiative, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking research ideas for curbing opioid abuse and addiction from basic science to implementation research across all disciplines in
- opioid addiction and overdose medications
- implementation science for preventing and treating addiction
- addiction prevention and treatment
- preclinical research on pain
- clinical trials on pain management
- improving outcomes in infants and children exposed to opioids.
NIH plans to award more than $850 million in support of HEAL Initiative research in 2019. This adds to a substantial investment made by NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) in the areas of pain, addiction, complementary medicine, and much more.
“The NIH HEAL Initiative is taking an ‘all-hands-on deck’ approach to this crisis, garnering expertise from almost every NIH IC to attack the problem from all angles,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, MD PhD. “We are seeking applications from research institutions that understand innovative clinical trial design and a wide range of pain conditions to help us build a clinical trial network that can evaluate the full spectrum of potential strategies for pain management. For HEAL’s success, we will call upon expertise in modeling human organs on tissue chips so that we can study how the brain is altered by addiction and how to reverse these changes with medication.”
He added, “We recognize that the plan is ambitious, but we are confident that with the robust contributions of the research community we will improve treatments for opioid misuse and addiction, enhance pain management, and provide lasting solutions to the opioid crisis.”
Find more information about the HEAL Initiative and an overview of the research plan, on the NIH website.
