Ruth L. Kirschstein Auditorium, Natcher Conference Center, NIH Main Campus, Bethesda, MD
This National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)-sponsored The Opioid Crisis and the Future of Addiction and Pain Therapeutics: Opportunities, Tools, and Technologies Symposium will highlight challenges and opportunities throughout the discovery and development process for addiction- and pain-related medications in the pre-competitive preclinical stage and provide a framework for more focused efforts within the research community.
There has been a dramatic increase in individuals who abuse and subsequently become addicted to opiates. The current "opioid crisis" is now a public health burden resulting in deaths, debilitation and significant social and economic impact. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping to End Addiction Long-termSM (HEAL) Initiative addresses multiple challenges, including the development of currently unavailable non-addictive pain medications, medical interventions for opioid overdose and new addiction treatments. The development of such medications requires concerted efforts among many researchers to enable the discovery and validation of new targets, pathways, biomarkers and therapeutic candidates. The success of such discoveries will rely heavily on the availability of biologically, physiologically and pharmacologically relevant reagents, assays, model systems and validated probe compounds that need to be both reproducible and highly predictive of efficacy in humans.