The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the nation’s leading medical research agency and the primary Federal agency whose mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge. The mission of the NIH also includes enhancing health, lengthening life, reducing illness and disability, conducting, supporting, and making medical discoveries that improves and saves people’s health and lives.
The opioid crisis highlights the urgent need for novel non-addictive pain medications, as well as improved treatments for opioid addiction and overdose. There is a need for pharmacological agents directed at novel targets to test new therapeutic hypotheses, new clinic-ready drugs directed at those targets, and new testing systems with the potential to be more predictive of human clinical response than traditionally used models. Through the Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, NCATS will focus on the development of human cell-based models of opioid misuse and addiction and of pain. The Stem Cell Translation Laboratory (SCTL) is a state-of-the-art research facility within NCATS’ Division of Pre-Clinical Innovation is dedicated to addressing the scientific and technological challenges in the iPSC field. Specifically, the SCTL aims to develop a renewable supply of human cell-based models focusing on new patient-derived iPSC lines that give rise to specialized, functional nerve cells that are relevant for opioid misuse, addiction, and pain.

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