This National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)-sponsored The Opioid Crisis and the Future of Addiction and Pain Therapeutics: Opportunities, Tools, and Technologies Symposium will highlight challenges and opportunities throughout the discovery and development process for addiction- and pain-related medications in the pre-competitive preclinical stage and provide a framework for more focused efforts within the research community.

Symposium Goals

1. Identify next generation targets and pathways for pain and addiction treatment.
2. Highlight lessons learned from successes and failures with current pain and addiction targets.
3. Discuss biomarkers to enable clinical trials.
4. Describe more predictive in vitro, in vivo and ex vivo assays for pain and addiction to validate new targets, pathways and clinical candidates and to address safety and efficacy.
5. Examine new discovery technologies and methodologies for pain and addiction therapeutics (including small molecules and biologics).
6. Highlight key NIH resources and initiatives to support the development of pain and addiction therapeutics.