In the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, Congress mandated NIDA to promote the development of
medications "to treat the symptoms and disease of drug abuse." NIDA was entrusted with
facilitating the development of pharmacotherapies to treat addiction. With this
initiative, NIDA launched a Medications Development Program to support and coordinate
academic and private sector scientists throughout the medications development
lifecycle - from the creation of new compounds in laboratories to the testing
of products in clinical trials. The program's support has been instrumental
in bringing buprenorphine and buprenorpohine-naloxine, for the treatment of
opiate addiction, to the public.
More than ten years ago, NIDA's Division of Pharmacotherapies and Medical Consequences
of Drug Abuse (DPMCDA) developed a vision for and began building a comprehensive
Informatics Program to streamline the drug development lifecycle of new anti-addiction
treatments. Key elements of the vision are to promote standardization in addiction
clinical research processes and information, and to provide a central repository of
the data and knowledge produced from them. Today, as a result of the steady progress
to achieve and extend the vision, NIDA has a clinical Informatics Program that offers
the addiction clinical research community a knowledge management and mining capability
that maximizes the return on research investments.
Using the systems developed for the NIDA Informatics Program researchers can re-analyze studies
conduct mega-analysis across over 50 clinical research studies encompassing
clinical transactions pertaining to approximately 15,000 trial participants.
The broader analysis this affords increases researcher ability to make inferences about
how to develop therapies to prevent and treat addiction as well as to design more
effective translational studies. The power of this knowledge management capability
continues to grow with each new trial data set.
NIDA's Informatics Program includes systems to support
pre-clinical discovery and assessment, clinical trial safety oversight, clinical research management, and
document management. The scope of research covers the development of therapies for stimulants,
marijuana, nicotine, and opiate addictions. Core technology and
services support centralized storage of data
and support new testing batteries that span multiple treatment programs. The
repository also stores and reports on data sets from large, national,
multi-site clinical studies.
To learn more about the informatics program, select from the tabs above. |
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