Key Dates

Related Announcements

PA-20-185 - NIH Research Project Grant (Parent R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
PA-20-183 - NIH Research Project Grant (Parent R01 Clinical Trial Required)
PA-20-200 - NIH Small Research Grant Program (Parent R03 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
PA-20-195 - NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Program (Parent R21 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
PA-20-194 - NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Program (Parent R21 Clinical Trial Required)
PA-20-272 - Administrative Supplements to Existing NIH Grants and Cooperative Agreements (Parent Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Optional)
PA-20-022 - Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

Issued by

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

Purpose

This Notice encourages research projects that 1) leverage data science to provide actionable insights for substance use prevention and treatment, 2) shorten the time between data capture and data availability so that data are available real-time or near real-time, and 3) explore methods and tools that may allow for faster or better localized responses for substance use treatment and prevention. Priority will be given to projects that emphasize the use of existing data streams (e.g., electronic health records, syndromic surveillance, claims data, registry data, pharmacy dispensing, social media, and mortality records).

Collaborations among multiple disciplines are encouraged for this Notice. Priority will be given to applications that demonstrate the involvement and support of community-based stakeholders and other end-users (e.g., clinicians, patients, parents, public health professionals, patient representatives) along the research continuum.

Individuals from diverse backgrounds, including those from groups historically underrepresented in the STEM fields, who wish to pursue further studies or careers in data science as it relates to addiction research are highly encouraged to apply.

Background

A significant time lag in translating health research to practice, policy, and population health has been a well-recognized challenge in public health. Additional research is needed that leverages data science to provide timely data-driven insights that inform planning, decision-making, and assessment of population-wide interventions in prevention and treatment settings and to advance precision public health to deliver the right intervention to the right people at the right time.

NIH defines data science as the interdisciplinary field of inquiry in which quantitative and analytical approaches, processes, and systems are developed and used to extract knowledge and insights from increasingly large and/or complex sets of data.

Research Objectives

NIDA is interested in applications that leverage data science to advance translation of science to inform drug misuse epidemiology and etiology that can lead to actionable insights. Of particular interest are projects that explore methods, approaches, and/or tools to facilitate the availability, accuracy, and timeliness of data sources that could provide novel insights into substance use prevention and treatment near real-time or real-time, and projects that propose to develop methods and tools for small area estimation to inform decisions of local (e.g., substate) jurisdictions.

Research projects that could be addressed in response to this NOSI include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Predict who may be at highest risk for developing substance use disorders using near real-time or real-time data (e.g., social media, EHR) to provide recommended actions and facilitate access to preventive interventions
• Enhance or develop methods for forecasting or nowcasting small-area or local estimates to inform public health officials where to allocate public health resources
• Explore methods that characterize intersectionality of social determinants of health and individual factors to identify subpopulations who might benefit from tailored prevention interventions
• Develop methods that can efficiently link data from diverse systems for trackable datasets aggregation or evaluate optimal linkage of data from multiple sources (e.g., incorporation of the drug market data with near or real-time data to understand emerging drug problems)
• Leverage existing data sources or those that have been used for other types of research, ranging from individual physician researchers-hosted data to public census data, that can assemble a bigger picture for substance misuse to address fundamental issues in prevention and services using innovative linking or matching methods
• Develop methods and workflows for integration of heterogenous data; approaches for data/metadata acquisition, processing, provenance, wrangling, and compression, including development of standards and data exchange formats for domain-specific data; validating and benchmarking analysis
• Improve technologies to mine or automatically extract data from EHR, clinical trials data, digital health devices, social media, and other observational and experimental data to generate evidence that informs substance use treatment and prevention
• Enhance existing tools, algorithms, or methodologies through additional data, automation, or increased interoperability (e.g., methods to track and categorize emerging illicit drugs, increasing interoperability and automation for data from laboratories and medical examiner/coroner’s office to increase the timeliness of incorporating the information in existing surveillance systems)
• Develop data visualization and dissemination tools for small area estimation or local estimates (e.g., including a feature to implement outbreak detection or spatial outlier detection methods to identify counties or small areas)
• Explore methods to model the contribution of drug use to other causes of death, especially for deaths not explicitly recorded as drug overdose or drug-related
• Explore methods of genetic, chemical, neurobiological, and behavioral mechanisms of substance use, misuse, and recovery

Prospective applicants are encouraged to contact the NIDA program staff listed below to ensure that the proposed aims are consistent with NIDA’s mission.

Application and Submission Information

This notice applies to due dates on or after June 5, 2022 and subsequent receipt dates through September 8, 2025.

Submit applications for this initiative using one of the following funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) or any reissues of these announcement through the expiration date of this notice.

• PA-20-185.: NIH Research Project Grant (Parent R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• PA-20-183: NIH Research Project Grant (Parent R01 Clinical Trial Required)
• PA-20-200:NIH Small Research Grant Program (Parent R03 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• PA-20-195: NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Program (Parent R21 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• PA-20-194: NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Program (Parent R21 Clinical Trial Required)
• PA-20-272: Administrative Supplements to Existing NIH Grants and Cooperative Agreements (Parent Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Optional)
• PA-20-022 - Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
  

All instructions in the SF424 (R&R) Application Guide and the funding opportunity announcement used for submission must be followed, with the following additions:

• For funding consideration, applicants must include NOT-DA-23-006 (without quotation marks) in the Agency Routing Identifier field (box 4B) of the SF424 R&R form. Applications without this information in box 4B will not be considered for this initiative.

Applications nonresponsive to terms of this NOSI will not be considered for the NOSI initiative.

Inquiries

Scientific/Research Contact(s)

Janet Kuramoto-Crawford, PhD
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Division of Epidemiology, Services and Prevention Research (DESPR)
Telephone: (301) 443-8856
Email: [email protected]

Susan N. Wright, PhD
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Division of Neuroscience and Behavior (DNB)
Telephone: (301) 402-6683
Email: [email protected]