NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term® Initiative (HEAL)

The NIH HEAL Initiative® was launched in April 2018 to accelerate scientific solutions to address the national overdose crisis, including opioid and stimulant use disorders and pain. HEAL research addresses urgent unmet needs across the lifespan – from infancy to adulthood. It encompasses prevention, treatment, and recovery support approaches for people at risk for or with substance use disorders, and the prevention and management of pain. The overarching goal of the initiative is to develop evidence-based strategies capable of providing rapid and lasting solutions to the opioid overdose crisis.

• Develop and test novel prevention, treatment, and recovery strategies for opioid use disorder (OUD), other substance use disorders (SUDs), and overdoses.
• Support research to characterize long-term trajectories and outcomes for individuals with OUD, including those associated with recovery, and the factors that impact these outcomes.
• Evaluate the potential of existing therapeutics for conditions that share neural circuitry with OUD.
• Advance research to prevent and treat polysubstance use disorders (PolySUD) and drug overdoses.
• Develop prevention interventions for high-risk populations impacted by the overdose crisis.
• Utilize data, monitoring, technology, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify and inform the deployment of interventions for populations at high-risk of opioid use and overdose.
• Advance integrated models of care to address OUD and psychiatric and medical co-morbidities, including management of severe chronic pain in patients with OUD.
• Address treatment and recovery challenges associated with OUD co-morbidities and with polysubstance misuse.
• Integrate existing and newly generated data to advance data science in OUD and overdoses, including for the identification of risk biomarkers, predictive models of treatment responses, and new -therapeutic targets.
• Optimize clinical data standards to help advance AI and other research analysis tools toward addressing the challenges of OUD, overdoses and chronic pain management.
• Develop mechanistically varied and highly efficacious therapeutics for the treatment of pain, also expanding to include non-drug approaches, such as neuromodulation, behavioral therapies, exercise, and acupuncture.
• Discover and validate treatment targets for pain that have little or no risk of substance use disorders.
• Develop highly predictive disease-specific pain models and new approach methodologies (NAMs) that are more predictive of human pain conditions to accelerate efficacious, nonaddictive pain therapeutic development.
• Develop pain prevention strategies to reduce risk of chronic pain across the lifespan, particularly during key transitions across the life course.
• Develop biomarkers for predicting treatment response, safety, target engagement and/or that may serve as surrogate endpoints in clinical trials.
• Evaluate the efficacy of individualized, mechanism-based treatment approaches that consider a person’s specific biological, psychological, and social traits underlying chronic pain conditions, thus improving treatment outcomes.

Visit https://www.nih.gov/heal for more information.