NIH leadership from across the agency has been working diligently over the past several months to identify areas of greatest opportunity for research to address the national opioid crisis.
The first ever “The Opioid Hackathon,” which was in part sponsored by the UCI Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (ICTS), demonstrated a new and rapid turn-turnaround approach to solving the opioid crisis through citizen engagement and led to 20 potential solutions in fewer than 24 hours.
What could be the first medical treatment for cocaine addiction is being created by Institute for Translational Medicine (ITM) researchers Ming Xu, PhD, and Xiaoyang Wu, PhD. Their research edits a patch of normal skin using an engineering technology that puts an anti-cocaine gene into skin stem cells. This system allows Xu and Wu to take a small section of skin, add the anti-cocaine gene to the skin’s cells, and then put it back onto the patient through a process called grafting, a routine procedure where a piece of skin is added onto the body.
The concepts of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns apply not only to intelligence and politics, but to any discipline where the gathering of knowledge is paramount. An all-day, multi site workshop on the devastating opioid crisis was held to discuss these concepts. The event, called "Developing a Research Agenda for Addressing the Opioid Epidemic in NC," was held on May 16, 2018 at the Research Triangle Park (RTP) Conference Center in Durham. Participants included doctors and researchers from UNC, Duke, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services and more.
On June 22, 2018 the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research hosted a symposium to stimulate collaborations among researchers, industry partners and the community to advance new efforts to address the opioid crisis. More than 200 attendees gathered for the Columbia Opioid Symposium titled “New Collaborations Towards New Solutions”.
Many research strategies related to the opioid crisis focus on increasing access to effective treatments for opioid use disorders, but it’s also vital to prevent addiction before it starts. The Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network (Michigan OPEN), which aims to develop a preventive approach to the opioid epidemic, recently hosted a drug take back event that collected and disposed of one ton of pills, including 54,000 opioid pills.
Posted: July 12, 2018
Experts in many corners of Penn Medicine are at work combatting the deadly toll of the opioid epidemic, including the physicians and researchers of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE) at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Survivors of opioid overdose have a higher risk of death than individuals who have not experienced an overdose. Effective strategies to lower that risk are critically important to combatting the opioid epidemic in the United States.
Medications to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) are one potential strategy, but research about the effect of medication use on survival after an overdose is limited. To address that gap, a team led by researchers from the Boston University CTSI reviewed medical records for more than 17,500 adults who had survived an opioid overdose.
