Funded Projects

Although medication-based treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) can effectively reduce overdose risk and improve health outcomes, most people discontinue treatment too soon. Peer support specialists, who are individuals with direct experience with a substance use disorder, can offer social support to help individuals with OUD overcome barriers to treatment and recovery. This project will develop, deliver, and evaluate an innovative peer support specialist intervention to help individuals begin and stay in a treatment program. The research will focus on rural populations and underserved communities, using a dynamic modeling framework to prioritize at-risk communities for treatment offered through mobile health clinics.

People who have anxiety and/or depression are particularly susceptible to misusing opioids to avoid negative emotional states. This project aims to develop and test a fully autonomous (no-human operator) cognitive behavioral therapy-based digital therapeutic for people with co-occurring opioid use disorder and anxiety or depression. The goal is to specifically target compulsive opioid use motivated by the relief of unpleasant emotions. The researchers will modify an existing digital therapeutic and test its efficacy in this patient population.

Buprenorphine is used for treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD), and patients often take it for many years by slowly dissolving it in the mouth. In 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned about possible oral complications from buprenorphine use, including tooth decay, oral infections, and tooth loss. However, this warning was largely based on small studies with no comparison group and no assessment of other risk factors such as limited dental care. This project will follow two groups of individuals with OUD who take either sublingual buprenorphine or methadone, to compare their oral health and understand barriers and facilitators of dental care. The results will be used to plan an intervention for preventing and treating oral diseases in this patient group.

Evidence-based behavioral treatments for pain are among the most effective and safe approaches, but they are underused, especially among patients taking opioids long-term. Despite known risks to long-term opioid therapy (including opioid use disorder and overdoses), patients may be reluctant to try something different to manage their pain. This project brings together two evidence-based behavior change interventions—motivational interviewing and contingency management—into an online format. The research will test whether web-based tools or mobile apps influence a patient’s willingness to consider using non-medication treatments for pain. The research will assess feasibility, acceptability to patients and providers, and broad-scale implementation.

Use of remote data collection in developmental research can make it easier for families to participate in such research and increase sociodemographic diversity of participants. The goal of this project is to validate remote methods for testing early cognitive development, particularly attention and memory skills, in 4-, 8-, and 12-month-old infants from traditionally underrepresented populations in neuroscience research. The project will integrate multiple types of data to improve remote measurement of infant cognition within the home and will help expand understanding of developmental trajectories and mechanisms across diverse environments and contexts.

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a frequent cause of disability and chronic pain. Treatment often relies on analgesics like opioids to manage OA pain, with all the associated risks; other approaches to treat OA are often invasive and inaccessible to patients. Therefore, novel analgesic strategies are needed to reduce the high burden of knee OA-induced pain. This project aims to study in detail and target the sensory neurons that drive OA pain to assist in the development of more effective pain therapeutics.

People who use opioids, as well as those who take medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for opioid use disorder (OUD), report significant problems with sleep and biological rhythms. This project will explore the activity of a novel group of photosensitive neurons in the retinas, a potential source for sleep disturbances in these individuals. The research could lead to new treatment strategies and responses, but also may identify a non-invasive, circadian biomarker to predict recovery and relapse in people with OUD.

Medications for opioid use disorder (OUD) are safe and effective. However, many people do not take them long enough to achieve sustained recovery, putting them at risk of overdose. Peer recovery support services—which are delivered by trained individuals with lived experience of addiction and recovery—may help people with OUD initiate and stay in medication treatment. This project will adapt peer recovery support services for use in outpatient substance use treatment settings and test their implementation and effectiveness in helping people with OUD achieve long-term recovery. If successful, the program could be implemented in a variety of outpatient treatment programs, including in underserved rural areas.

Immune checkpoint proteins regulate the immune system to prevent it from indiscriminately attacking cells. Some cancers activate these immune checkpoints to avoid attack, and drugs that target certain immune checkpoints are approved for cancer treatment. The same pathway may also be involved in pain because immune checkpoint proteins, such as programmed death 1 (PD-1) and the molecule that binds to it (programmed death ligand 1 [PD-L1]), also are found in sensory neurons, microglia, and macrophages. This project will investigate PD-1/PD-L1 in different cell populations to determine their contribution to pain and to the effects of opioids such as morphine. This knowledge may help identify new drugs for pain management that modify immune checkpoint activity.

There are currently no reliable tools to measure pain objectively, and health care providers must rely on patient’s subjective reports and observations of patient behavior to determine the level of pain a person experiences. This hampers both effective pain management and the development of new pain medications. This project will assess an imaging technology called Radiocaine that in animal studies has been able to identify the origin of pain as well as its intensity. The goal is to use Radiocaine in clinical trials for pain treatments, thereby enhancing treatment effectiveness and facilitating development of new treatments.