With more than 130 people dying each day from opioid-related overdoses in the United States, the national crisis of opioid misuse, addiction, and overdose has reached epidemic proportions. It calls for scientific solutions that only the biomedical research community — working together with patients, providers, and stakeholders — can provide.
An aggressive research effort led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Helping to End Addiction Long-termSM Initiative, or NIH HEAL InitiativeSM, aims to prevent opioid overdose deaths and improve how we understand and treat both pain and opioid addiction.
“We need all hands on deck,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., at the January 2020 inaugural meeting of HEAL researchers and partners. “The unique structure of this initiative offers the promise of a united effort that will advance scientific progress further than would be possible otherwise.”
Too often, biomedical researchers and their projects find themselves cut off from related disciplines that could provide a fuller picture of the problem they seek to address. For the NIH HEAL Initiative, tackling the opioid crisis from every angle means deliberately focusing on inclusion and collaboration. That’s why the initiative is harnessing the power of 20 NIH Institutes and Centers, partner agencies from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the private sector, and the people whose lives have been touched by the opioid crisis.
“Our mission is to provide solutions to the formidable and rapidly evolving opioid crisis," said Rebecca Baker, Ph.D., Director of the NIH HEAL Initiative. “The research response has to match in magnitude and in urgency.”
A cross-disciplinary approach
NIH HEAL Initiative research projects target two primary goals: enhancing pain management and improving treatments for opioid misuse and addiction.