NIDA Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network: The first decade.

This presentation provides an overview of the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network’s first ten years. It begins with the premise for the CTN’s initiation: to improve addiction treatment using randomized, controlled clinical trials to generate evidence-based treatments that are then implemented in community treatment programs via engagement with providers participating in the research process. It then describes the infrastructure of the CTN, the research done thus far (including multiple secondary and platform studies), the overall utilization of that research (including dissemination strategies and the CTN Dissemination Library), and plans for the next decade of the CTN.

The future mission of the CTN is to continue to help bring drug abuse treatment into mainstream medical practice, maintain a flexible research strategy/portfolio, help facilitate research utilization through better training platforms for the clinical workforce, and address more research questions that directly impact clinical practice.