As a professor and a clinical researcher, I’ve witnessed the devastating consequences of inadequate funding in the area of substance use disorder and addiction. Despite the growing urgency of the addiction crisis in the United States, funding for research and treatment remains drastically insufficient and significantly lower than other medical and psychiatric conditions. Cure Addiction Now is one of the only organizations working to bridge the funding gap and create opportunities for much needed innovative research.

I’ve worked in the area of substance use (and particularly opioid use disorder) treatment for the past 20 years. Over the years, I would meet with various business professionals who would routinely comment on how underfunded addiction treatment was. I didn’t believe them for a long time- after all, there is an entire NIH institute devoted to the science of addiction. But then I started to compare our field with related mental health fields and realized these comments were true. The most shocking discovery for me was the realization that over the past 60 years, more than 90 medications have been developed for depression (and still more are being developed today!), while in that same period of time, only four medications are available on the market for opioid use disorder. No successful medications have been identified for other forms of substance use, such as stimulant use disorder. It is clear to me now that despite the high rate of morbidity and mortality associated with these disorders, there continues to be substantial under-investment in addiction medicine from industry and private sources.

Fortunately, there is a field of addiction scientists and clinicians who are committed to making a difference in the lives of our patients, and we have ideas that—if seeded properly—could be developed into transformative treatment approaches that would help individuals who are suffering. Our current funding structure makes the acquisition of this seed money very challenging and slow, which is especially troublesome because our public health need for help is at an all-time high. Cure Addiction Now is directly addressing this challenge by providing vital seed funds to scientists whose ideas are judged by a panel of peer experts as being innovative and feasible, and this support is vital in helping us accelerate development of new potential treatment targets and procure larger NIH grant or industry support to more quickly conduct larger and more definitive trials. I am extremely thankful to Cure Addiction Now for recognizing this major unmet need in our field and catalyzing support for our science and—by extension—our patients and their loved ones who are suffering with them.

Blog post written by:

Kelly E. Dunn, Ph.D., MBA

Director, Kahlert Institute for Addiction Medicine
Professor, Departments of Psychiatry, Neurobiology
University of Maryland, Baltimore