Recognizing the need for and value in bridging the gap between clinical research and treatment, this initiative shall establish a consortium of academic substance abuse researchers and community treatment programs to serve as the Great Lakes Regional Node (GLRN) for the NIDA National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN). This consortium involves substance abuse clinical researchers from the three major research universities in the State of Michigan (Wayne State University; University of Michigan; and Michigan State University) in collaboration with a variety of substance abuse Community Treatment Programs (CTPs). The CTPs have been selected to assure diversity in therapeutic modalities employed, demographic and psychiatric characteristics of patients served, and the nature of the drug problems being treated. The CTN has two principal goals: first, to determine whether treatment interventions with demonstrated efficacy in rigorously controlled clinical trials are both useful and effective in CTPs. Because the CTN will have access to large samples of patients to participate in controlled clinical trials of treatment interventions, the process of evaluation can be rapid. Such large scale testing also will allow secondary analyses of outcome data to identify predictors for matching patients to effective treatment. The second goal of the CTN is to improve the quality of care available in CTPs by facilitating the adoption of research-based treatment interventions. The proposed GLRN assembles a group of academic researchers with long standing expertise in the evaluation of the efficacy and usefulness of behavioral, pharmacologic, and combined treatments for a variety of substance abuse problems, and with parallel expertise in the data management of large scale clinical trials. In many instances, the CTPs and these academic centers already have established research collaborations that will facilitate the rapid implementation of new research protocols. The inclusion of other CTPs without this background will allow us to investigate the process of introducing research and collaboration into a CTP to determine the problems encountered and their solutions. To this end we have enlisted the aid of researchers with a history of process evaluation for technology transfer. We also document the Node's capability to implement currently approved CTN concept proposals, as well as to implement new proposals in areas relating to behavioral therapy, pharmacotherapy and health services delivery research. In summary we believe that the GLRN has a very strong research team, the administrative infrastructure to manage the program, and enthusiastic CTPs anxious to participate in the NIDA CTN.
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