STSS Aspire Heal Task Order 10

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Over 25 million people in the United States experience pain every day (2012 National Health Interview Survey data) and need safe, addiction-free treatments to alleviate their suffering. This clinical demand is of tremendous importance given that overprescribing and abuse of opioids for managing acute and chronic pain has fueled the current epidemic of opioid use disorder and overdose deaths, and the effectiveness of opioids for long-term pain management is being questioned. Safe, effective, and non-addictive drugs (small molecules and biologics) to treat pain, mitigate addiction and reverse overdose are key to addressing the opioid crisis that has only worsened following the COVID-19 pandemics. Given failures and limitations of previous drug development efforts, drugs that recognize novel targets, have novel structures, and can be identified in human-based, physiologically relevant in vitro systems are needed. In 2018 NCATS by releasing NCATS ASPIRE Design Challenges, which solicited design ideas from the broader scientific community to address areas of the preclinical drug discovery process related to non-addictive pain treatment that could be accelerated by the introduction of new technologies related to: • Integrated Chemistry Databases • Electronic Synthetic Chemistry Portals • Predictive Algorithms • Biological Assays • Integrated Solutions of the above aspects In 2020, NCATS followed up with the ASPIRE Reduction-to-Practice Challenge, in which extramural researchers and innovators formed collaborative teams to deliver fully functioning prototypes of a non-addictive analgesics drug discovery platform that incorporated all the challenge topics from the design challenges (Integrated Chemistry Databases, Electronic Synthetic Chemistry Portals, Predictive Algorithms, Biological Assays). The Purdue University Team (PI: Gaurav Chopra) and the CiBots, Inc. Team (PI: Babak Esmaeli-Azad) garnered the grand prize and the runner-up prizes, respectively. We are now seeking to harness the array of technologies developed during the 2020 NCATS ASPIRE Reduction-to-Practice Challenge to build a non-traditional, merged, “super-team” of all expertise necessary to (1) complete integration of the two complementary platforms and (2) enhance the unified platform’s capability and rapidly deliver new analgesics drug candidates with safe and improved properties.