RTI International, https://www.rti.org a nonprofit research institute, has been funded by NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) https://nida.nih.gov with $2,259,661, to establish a specialized research center that will use multidisciplinary and innovative sciences to reduce the public health burden caused by opioid addiction.
RTI will lead the Integrative Omics Center for Accelerating Neurobiological Understanding of Opioid Addiction (ICAN). A national network of top genomics researchers will conduct four interlocking studies with the goal to improve options for treating Opioid Use Disorder (OUD).
ICAN launched in September 2022 involves researchers from multiple institutions across the country from Johns Hopkins University to the University of California Santiago. Each provider will bring their own unique contributions to the project.
While researchers still do not know why some people face a higher risk of addiction than others, more studies are working to better understand how individual genes may be related and apply this information to better tailor treatments to the individual.
By levering the power of omics, the goal for ICAN is to offer field changing breakthroughs and identify actionable targets for development of OUD treatments. The team will conduct large scale integrated multi-omics studies of humans to identify related genes and gene networks. The next step is to make national omics resource for studying opioid addiction available.
With more than 80,000 opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2021, which is the highest number on record, enables projects like ICAN to provide insight on the public health impact of addiction and help to find viable solutions to deal with this global challenge.