Funded Projects

NOFO Title: Notice of Special Interest to Encourage Eligible NIH HEAL Initiative Awardees to Apply for PA-20-222: Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
NOFO Number: NOT-NS-20-107; PA-21-071
Summary:

Few integrated treatments are available that simultaneously address the fundamental causes of chronic pain and opioid misuse/opioid use disorder and focus on well-being among individuals with chronic pain and opioid misuse/opioid use disorder. This research will inform development of patient-centered interventions that increase quality of life and engagement in valued activities, are culturally appropriate for use by diverse patient populations, and reduce stigma related to chronic pain and opioid misuse/opioid use disorder. The results of this project will be used to inform future research focused on developing mobile health treatments for individuals with chronic pain and opioid use disorder, and for developing culturally appropriate treatments for chronic pain and opioid use disorder in Hispanic/Latino individuals.

NOFO Title: HEAL Initiative: Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN) Coordination and Translation Center (U2C Clinical Trial Optional)
NOFO Number: DA19-024
Summary:

Many individuals with opioid use disorder pass through the criminal justice system over the course of their life. Improved access to high-quality, evidence-based addiction treatment in justice settings is critical to addressing the opioid crisis. The Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN) is studying approaches to increase high-quality care for people with opioid misuse and opioid use disorder in justice populations. This research supports a scientist from a group underrepresented in biomedicine to expand capacity of the Mason Coordination and Translation Center that is managing logistics, stakeholder engagement, and dissemination of findings and products from the JCOIN network.

NOFO Title: HEAL Initiative: HEAL Data2Action – Innovation and Acceleration Projects, Phased Awards (R61/R33, Clinical Trial Optional)
NOFO Number: RFA-DA-23-057
Summary:

Emergency departments (EDs) are key settings for identifying and treating opioid use disorder (OUD), but EDs are underused for this purpose. This project aims to develop a data system that automates and integrates electronic health record and administrative data from EDs into the Clinical Emergency Department Registry, partnering with the American College of Emergency Physicians. The research will assess the digital readiness of ED systems before developing and deploying the enhanced ED OUD data infrastructure. This research aims to guide near-real time hospital quality improvement initiatives, toward development of a web-based, near-real time dashboard that can be used in EDs across the country.

NOFO Title: PHS 2018-02 Omnibus Solicitation of the NIH for Small Business Innovation Research Grant Applications (Parent SBIR [R43/R44] Clinical Trial Required)
NOFO Number: PA-18-573
Summary:

Sober Grid™ has developed a smartphone-based mobile application currently in use by more than 120,000 individuals worldwide who are in, or seeking, recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. The “Grid,” as it is known, is a mobile-based, social recovery community providing rapid context-specific peer support, efficient help seeking, motivational enhancement exercises, and member ratings of support content—all aimed to prevent relapse. The overarching goal of this phase II project is to extend the current capabilities of the Sober Grid app to achieve a comprehensive social recovery support app featuring intelligent, context-appropriate resource matching and 24/7 rapid-response peer coaching that is effective in reducing disordered substance use and is cost-effective. This projects tests whether providing this functionality to high-risk members will be acceptable, feasible, increase access to and engagement with resources, and have a positive effect in increasing time to relapse and days of consecutive abstinence.

NOFO Title: HEAL Initiative: HEAL Data2Action Innovation Projects (R61/R33 Clinical Trial Optional)
NOFO Number: RFA-DA-22-051
Summary:

During the COVID-19 public health emergency, the Substance Use and Mental Health Services Administration relaxed regulations for take-home dosing of methadone, offering an opportunity to improve methadone treatment access and address racial and ethnic disparities. This project aims to address regulatory, legal liability, and financial concerns related to clinical practice changes in opioid treatment programs. The project will first review state administrative data and conduct qualitative interviews to inform the intervention approach. The project will then evaluate an opioid treatment program intervention involving take-home methadone and its effect on take-home dosing, retention in care, and health outcomes for Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino individuals who take methadone for opioid use disorder.

NOFO Title: HEAL Initiative: Secondary Analysis and Integration of Existing Data Related to Acute and Chronic Pain Development or Management in Humans (R21 Clinical Trials Not Allowed)
NOFO Number: RFA-DE-22-011
Summary:

It is unclear if long-term use of opioids by head and neck cancer patients affects risk for depression, which is higher in this population compared to people without cancer. This knowledge could inform interventions such as increased opioid prescription safety or alternative pain management approaches and could thus help reduce the risk for depression-related outcomes. This project will use data from a national cancer database linked to Medicare claims and a Veterans Administration database to determine whether people with head and neck cancer that take opioid medications for more than 90 days have increased risk for new-onset or worsening depression or suicide death.

NOFO Title: Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
NOFO Number: PA-21-071
Summary:

Although there are effective prevention and treatment programs and services to address opioid misuse, opioid use disorder, and overdose, gaps remain between those needing and those receiving prevention and treatment. There is a need to better understand how to make these programs and services most effective at a local level, a problem being addressed by the HEALing Communities Study. This project supports a scientist from a group underrepresented in biomedicine to continue ongoing work to test the impact of an integrated set of evidence-based practices across health care, behavioral health, justice, and other community-based settings.

NOFO Title: PHS 2018-02 Omnibus Solicitation of the NIH for Small Business Innovation Research Grant Applications (Parent SBIR [R43/R44] Clinical Trial Required)
NOFO Number: PA-18-573
Summary:

Adolescents in the juvenile justice system demonstrate very high rates of tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use (ATOD), with rates that are estimated to be three times higher than non-justice-involved youth. Substance-abusing youth are at higher risk than nonusers for mental health problems, including depression, conduct problems, personality disorders, suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide, and completed suicide, as well as detrimental effects on neural development related to substance use. This project aims to adapt and test the feasibility and efficacy of a smartphone application (app) intervention prototype that would help adolescent substance users reduce or quit their substance use. The program, entitled Rewire, is based on the primary substance use cessation components tested in previous work with juvenile justice-involved adolescents and on intervention components shown to be central to smoking cessation, and applies a mindfulness approach as the guiding framework for the intervention.

NOFO Title: HEAL Initiative: Data and Methods to Address Urgent Needs to Stem the Opioid Epidemic (R01- Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
NOFO Number: RFA-DA-22-044
Summary:

Monitoring and reporting substance use and substance use disorder is difficult to obtain in real-time using conventional methods. However, social media captures large amounts of data about substance use that are reported by diverse groups of people. Analysis of these data can provide population- or subpopulation-level insights, at low cost and in near real-time. This project aims to convert large amounts of social media data on substance use into actionable knowledge using advanced natural language processing and artificial intelligence approaches. The researchers will publicly release the aggregated statistics through a dedicated dashboard and provide user-friendly, open-source tools to determine trends and analyze disparities.

NOFO Title: Notice of Special Interest to Encourage Eligible NIH HEAL Initiative Awardees to Apply for PA-20-222: Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
NOFO Number: NOT-NS-20-107
Summary:

The goal of this project is to discover potential targets for emergency department-based interventions that could enhance access to addiction treatment among Black and Latino individuals, who face significant disparities in access to ongoing addiction treatment. Through qualitative interviews with Black, Latino, and non-Latino White patients receiving emergency department-initiated buprenorphine, the research will identify patterns of barriers and facilitators for continuation of opioid use disorder treatment outside of the emergency department through a referral. The study will also evaluate differences in factors previously identified as predictors of worse treatment outcomes in these patient groups, including opioid overdose, polysubstance use, major depressive disorder, and stigma.

NOFO Title: PHS 2018-02 Omnibus Solicitation of the NIH, CDC, and FDA for Small Business Innovation Research Grant Applications (Parent SBIR [R43/R44] Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
NOFO Number: PA-18-574
Summary:

Newborn Abstinence Syndrome, which results from maternal opioid drug use prior to birth, is a serious condition that affects approximately 6% of all neonates born today in the U.S. and which is increasing rapidly in incidence because of this epidemic. Availability of a rapid screening test that can be administered at the point of care to all neonates would allow for early intervention, reducing costs of treatment and reducing pain and suffering for this vulnerable and helpless patient population. Providing a platform to accurately monitor actual levels of these drugs and their metabolites in such patients would allow better-controlled use of these pain management treatments, personalized to the needs of the individual neonate, and would reduce the probability of addiction and resulting complications, which include deleterious neurological effects. The purpose of this FastTrack SBIR project is to expand upon preliminary results that a device can sensitively and accurately detect opioids and their primary urinary metabolites in one-microliter urine samples, in less than a minute after sample introduction into the device, and adapt the device into a point-of-care instrument for use in hospitals, clinics, and other venues in which such tests are likely to be deployed.

NOFO Title: HEAL Initiative: America’s Startups and Small Businesses Build Technologies to Stop the Opioid Crisis (R43/R44 - Clinical Trial Optional)
NOFO Number: RFA-DA-19-019
Summary:

Pain is one of the most common and debilitating symptoms of a wide range of injuries and diseases. Safe and effective alternatives for treating pain that reduce dependence on opioids are, therefore, a primary goal of the NIH. This project proposes a non-invasive, non-pharmacological alternative to treat pain by combining an innovative electroencephalography (EEG)-based Neurofeedback (NF) solution in an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment. NF and VR have been shown to independently produce ameliorative effects on pain, and it is hypothesized that an NF training in VR would have synergistic effects, as VR would distract from pain perception to improve patient compliance in more engaging NF protocols that improve their ability to control pain perception. In the scope of this project, we will initially focus our work on chronic low back pain (cLBP), as this is a growing segment of chronic pain sufferers with a 39 percent worldwide lifetime prevalence, and whose sufferers have historically been heavy users of opiates; later stages of this project will expand this application to address other forms of pain.