UCLA to lead $25 million opioid study in rural America

Scientists from the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs will lead a $25 million National Institutes of Health study testing treatments, including the use of telemedicine, to help fight the opioid epidemic in rural America.

A separate, $3.3 million NIH grant, was awarded to another researcher from the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs to study the effectiveness of text message therapy to help patients with opioid addiction adhere to their treatment medications.

The grants, announced Thursday, are part of the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative, or HEAL Initiative, and will be distributed over a five-year period.

Yih-Ing Hser, who will lead the rural initiative, said the study will include more than 40 office-based, primary care clinics in five to six U.S. states. Hser is a distinguished research professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.

“We’ll build up the infrastructure to get the clinics ready to test the use of medication and behavioral therapies so that we can conduct the study in as close to real world settings as possible,” she said. A second phase of the study will “look at the use of telemedicine to help overcome treatment barriers, such as the long travel time it sometimes takes to reach clinics in rural areas.”

Dr. Larissa Mooney, co-lead investigator of the rural study and director of the UCLA Addiction Psychiatry Clinic at the Semel Institute, said the funding builds on work she, Hser and colleagues have done as part of the Clinical Trials Network of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “This study has the potential to expand access to life-saving treatments for opioid addiction in communities that have been significantly impacted by the opioid epidemic, and for new models of treatment to be sustainable even after the study is over.”

National Institute on Drug Abuse spokeswoman Shirley Simson said a “significant amount” of the $25 million grant, including $3.6 million for the first year of the five-year study, will be awarded to UCLA. Collaborating institutions and the Clinical Trials Network Data & Statistics Center will divide the remainder of the grant.

Suzette Glasner, an associate professor in the School of Nursing and of psychiatry in the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, will lead the text messaging study to assess whether cognitive behavioral therapy delivered through texts will help patients stick to their opioid treatment medications. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a technique that is used to help patients change their behaviors by changing the way they think about and approach challenges. 

“Medications for opioid use disorders are the gold standard treatment and continue to save and transform lives,” said Glasner, who also has studied the use of text messaging to help with HIV drug adherence. “But they only work if you take them, and adherence is low. My hope is that our work will help reverse this trend by providing a low-cost intervention.”

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