The NIDA Clinical Trials Network Posted on December 3, 2007 Roger D. Weiss (bio) describes this researcher-community collaboration.

A U-10 is a cooperative agreement; it’s generally a multi-site trial where the institute is also involved in the collaboration. So in this instance the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the NIDA Clinical Trials Network. So it’s seventeen sites, and in the Clinical Trials Network each site is called a node. And a node consists of a research center and somewhere in the range of about five community treatment programs.

The point of the NIDA Clinical Trials Network is that a lot of treatments that have been shown to be efficacious in clinical trials at academic research centers are never performed again. Community treatment programs never do them, in part they never hear about them because they don’t come to addiction research scientific meetings so they never hear about them.

And when they do hear about them, they say, number one, “These aren’t the kinds of patients we treat. You systematically excluded all the people that we actually see. And it’s too expensive. We can’t do it. And the people that are doing the treatment are not the kinds of people who work here.”

So that has been enough of a problem over the years that the Clinical Trials Network was developed so that it’s a partnership between researchers and community treatment program directors to develop and implement studies within community treatment programs doing studies that hopefully whatever is found to work is something that can then be implemented in those programs afterwards.

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