My Experience with ITC in Addiction Treatment

Unlike most other areas of clinical medicine over the past 80 years, addiction treatment programs have mostly developed apart from other areas of health care; they have not been greatly influenced by clinical and basic research. In essence, the worlds of translational clinical research and addiction treatment have had too few opportunities to learn from each other. Because of this, there are significant challenges in researching and developing products aimed at objectively diagnosing and treating addiction.

As a Ph.D. candidate, I was very fortunate to be involved with an NIH-funded interdisciplinary research program; the aim of our research was to develop objective measurements of recovery from opiate addiction. As a member of this group, I coordinated between my mentors at Penn State College of Medicine, professors at main campus, and clinicians at the Caron Foundation (a non-profit, residential addiction treatment facility). When I arrived on the project, my mentors had already been welcomed by the Caron Foundation, and my role was to implement the research protocol and act as the point man at Caron. As a quick outline, the study had three main goals: 1) developing a smart phone application that assesses mood in real time 2) using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) to assess brain function throughout the course of treatment, and most importantly 3) identifying biological markers to predict treatment outcome (e.g. what contributes to relapse after treatment). 

In this endeavor I was privileged to work with senior investigators that were open-minded and valued my input. Nevertheless, there are certain challenges faced whenever one coordinates a study of this magnitude, namely, communicating back and forth between academics and clinicians. In order to make sure this project got off the ground smoothly, I faced two dilemmas: I had to motivate workers on the clinical side to facilitate the research project (by increasing patient compliance), and I had to persuade the academic researchers to slightly alter the study protocol, thereby making the study easier to execute.

By tactfully informing those on the clinical side of the importance of our research, and explaining to those on the academic side that we need to refine our protocol, we were able to generate a better and more efficient research study that was ultimately more patient friendly. The study progressed ahead of schedule, and we feel that this research will have a major impact on healthcare policy for addiction treatment. In addition, the developments of our smart phone application and fNIR system have great potential to become marketable products in the future.