NIDA’s Role in the NIH HEAL Initiative

The National Institutes of Health HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-term^SM) Initiative launched in April 2018 with dedicated funding by Congress. The Initiative seeks to provide scientific solutions to the national opioid public health crisis, including improved prevention and treatment strategies for opioid misuse, overdose, and pain.

Researchers are taking a variety of approaches to improve public and individual health around opioid use through:

• Better understanding, management, and treatment of pain.
• Improving prevention and treatment for opioid misuse and addiction..
• Enhanced outcomes for infants and children exposed to opioids..
• Identifying risks and patterns of polydrug use, such as the use of opioids and stimulants together, and improving related prevention and treatment strategies..
• Examining ways to improve access to evidence-based prevention, treatment, and recovery services, especially for people who are at the greatest risk of negative health outcomes.

Learn more about the NIH HEAL Initiative^SM.

NIDA is the largest funder of research on the health aspects of drug use and addiction, and the Institute plays a key role in the NIH HEAL Initiative^SM. Today, NIDA leads or plays a major role in many of HEAL's more than 40 research programs and funds hundreds of individual studies under the Initiative. These include:

• Novel Therapeutic Options for Opioid and Stimulant Use Disorders and Overdose, through which NIDA has dramatically expanded research to develop new treatments for opioid and stimulant use disorders, as well as to reverse opioid-induced respiratory depression (trouble breathing).

• The HEALing Communities Study (HCS) implements approaches tailored to local needs to prevent and treat opioid misuse and opioid use disorder by working with local community members. HCS research sites are partnering with 67 communities highly affected by the opioid overdose and addiction crisis in four states to measure the impact of these efforts.

• The Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN) conducts studies on how to provide quality care for opioid misuse and opioid use disorder for populations involved in the legal system, facilitating partnerships between local and state legal systems and community-based treatment providers. JCOIN’s data informs policies and practices to improve the capacity of the justice system to respond to the opioid crisis, including policies to reduce opioid use upon re-entry to the community, a significant risk factor for overdose and a major predictor of reinvolvement with the legal system.

• The HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study (HBCD), which NIDA leads, is funded through a partnership of NIH institutes, centers, and offices, with partial funding from the HEAL Initiative. HBCD is the largest, long-term study of early brain and child development in the United States. It is enrolling around 7,500 pregnant volunteers from 25 research sites across the United States. The study will explore how the brain develops and is affected by exposure to opioids and other substances, as well as environmental, social, and biological factors during pregnancy and after birth.

• The Preventing Opioid Use Disorder program will generate science toward making evidence-based prevention intervention services available and accessible to all people at risk for opioid and other substance misuse or use disorders. The research covers four broad strategic areas:
  1. Identifying risk for (and pathways to) opioid misuse to better understand who will benefit from opioid prevention services, and when.
  2. Discovering social and structural factors that are often out of an individual’s control but have a major impact on behavioral health and health equity.
  3. Developing and testing prevention interventions across a variety of settings and populations.
  4. Ensuring effective approaches can be used by, and are affordable to, communities who need them.

• With support from HEAL, the NIDA Clinical Trials Network (CTN) is enhancing its work to address opioid use. Under NIDA’s CTN, medical and specialty treatment providers, treatment researchers, patients, and NIDA cooperatively develop and deliver new treatment options to patients. With HEAL Initiative funding, NIDA has established five new CTN nodes, strengthening the CTN’s capacity to conduct trials by adding sites in new geographic locations and incorporating new investigators. HEAL funding is also supporting over 30 CTN clinical trials to test approaches for preventing substance use disorder and optimizing substance use treatment.

• Through the Integrated Management of Chronic Pain and OUD for Whole Recovery (IMPOWR) program, researchers are focused on learning more about strategies for treating people who have co-occurring chronic pain and opioid use disorder (OUD), a population that often struggles to find effective care in the fragmented systems that are currently available. IMPOWR researchers are developing and testing integrated patient-centered treatment interventions and models of care delivery to help these individuals manage their overall health and support recovery.

• Through the harm reduction research network, NIDA is supporting a national network of research projects that will study and amplify the effectiveness, implementation, and impact of existing and new harm reduction policies and practices.