SAFE Glen Cove Coalition: Opioid HEAL Initiative

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently published their 2018 research plan entitled HEAL – Helping to End Addiction Long-term initiative. The HEAL Initiative is an effort to advance national priorities in addressing the opioid crisis through science. With a focus on two primary areas — improving treatments for opioid misuse and addiction, and enhancing strategies for pain management — the plan describes a multifaceted program encompassing pre-clinical, clinical, drug repurposing, and community-based approaches.

NIH outlines 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.

The NIH is the nation's medical research agency and includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

The SAFE Glen Cove Coalition is conducting an opioid prevention awareness campaign entitled "Keeping Glen Cove SAFE" to educate and update the community regarding opioid use and its consequences. To learn more about this NIH report please visit https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-leadership-outlines-interdisciplinary-fy2018-research-plan-heal-initiative. To learn more about the SAFE Glen Cove Coalition please follow us on www.facebook.com/safeglencovecoalition.