The HEAL Initiative is a trans-NIH effort launched in April 2018 to advance national priorities in addressing the opioid crisis through science. It has a focus on two primary areas – improving treatments for opioid misuse and addiction, and enhancing strategies for pain management.
The plan put forward is for a multifaceted program encompassing pre-clinical, clinical, drug repurposing, and community-based approaches. There will be initial investments of the $500 million appropriated by Congress for fiscal year 2018 to bolster NIH’s research efforts in addiction and pain. Critical components of the HEAL research plan for FY2018 include:
- Developing extended-release and longer-acting opioid use disorder (OUD) medications and new therapies to counteract opioid-induced respiratory depression.
- Reformulating current medication-assisted treatments (MAT) to promote adherence to recovery programs by Americans on OUD medications.
- Supporting discovery and development of targets for non-addictive pain management, and therapies to treat those targets.
- Collecting data to determine what factors lead acute pain to transition to chronic pain and how to block that transition.
- Partnering with public and private groups to test effective treatments for pain and addiction using HEAL’s clinical trial networks.
- Expanding NIH’s Advancing Clinical Trials in Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal syndrome (ACT NOW) to assess its prevalence and determine best practices for clinical care of infants with this condition.
- Advancing new models of care for OUD and test integrated, evidence-based interventions within healthcare and criminal justice settings through the multi-site HEALing Communities initiative.