NCATS Announces HEAL Design Challenges to Inspire Innovative Opioid Crisis Solutions

The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invites innovators to submit novel design solutions for its ASPIRE (A Specialized Platform for Innovative Research Exploration) Design Challenges. Supported through the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-termSM (HEAL) Initiative, the goal of the Challenges is to reward and spur innovative and catalytic approaches toward solving the opioid crisis through development of: (1) novel chemistries; (2) data-mining and analysis tools and technologies; and (3) biological assays that will revolutionize discovery, development and pre-clinical testing of next generation, safer and non-addictive analgesics to treat pain, as well as new treatments for opioid use disorder and overdose.

NCATS anticipates that this integrated platform ultimately can be generalized to address many of the roadblocks in automated chemistry. Read more.