National Institute on Drug Abuse Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative

Objectives: Since its launch with the support of Congress in 2018, the NIH HEAL Initiative has made the nation’s largest ever investment in research to end the national overdose crisis. Overdose fatalities account for tens of thousands of deaths annually and there are nearly 9 million Americans ages 12 and older who misused opioids in the past year, and an estimated 5.7 million with opioid use disorder (OUD), which is likely an undercount of how many people are actually affected. In parallel, chronic pain affects 50 million adults in the United States with nearly 20 million living daily with chronic pain that interferes with their lives and if improperly treated, puts them at risk for illicit opioid misuse alongside the risk of OUD and overdoses. The NIH HEAL Initiative was launched through specific Congressional funding to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to address these challenges using a multifaceted evidence-based approach that brings together scientists, healthcare providers, patient advocates, community members, the private sector, and multiple levels of government – all sharply focused on developing and deploying scientific solutions with the ultimate goal of preventing all overdoses and developing safer, nonaddictive treatments for pain. The NIDA HEAL Initiative strategic plan for OUD and overdoses includes two core research objectives around which NIDA will prioritize HEAL research investments: (1) Advance research to prevent and treat OUD and overdoses including overdoses that result from the use of multiple substances simultaneously. (2) Advance cross-cutting research to prevent and treat OUD and overdoses in the context of chronic pain and other mental health conditions that commonly occur in people who experience OUD. These research objectives incorporate other cross-cutting goals, including enhancing women’s and children’s health; addressing public health challenges across the lifespan; promoting collaborative science; and leveraging data science for biomedical discovery.