The National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network: Forging a partnership between research knowledge and community practice.

The National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN) has faced many challenges over its first eleven years. This review explores some of these challenges and the paths the CTN took to meet these challenges, including: designing clinical trials that reflect the CTN’s mission and changing public health needs, finding the synergies in the varied expertise of clinical treatment providers and academic researchers, promoting evidence-based practices, and expanding the Network into mainstream medical practices to reach a broader patient population. Included in this exploration are specific examples from CTN clinical trials.

CTN studies have shown that quality clinical trials can be successfully implemented into practice settings unfamiliar with research logistics by taking clinicians’ practical needs and research knowledge level into account. The challenges yet to be faced in the CTN’s efforts to expand opportunities to offer existing treatments to the segment of the drug-abusing population that utilizes mainstream health care seem large, but not as large as the potential for improvements in public health.

Related protocols: CTN-0001, CTN-0002, CTN-0003, CTN-0004, CTN-0005, CTN-0006, CTN-0007, CTN-0009, CTN-0010, CTN-0011, CTN-0013, CTN-0014, CTN-0015, CTN-0017, CTN-0018, CTN-0019, CTN-0020, CTN-0021, CTN-0027, CTN-0028, CTN-0029, CTN-0030, CTN-0031, CTN-0032, CTN-0037, CTCN-0044, CTN-0047, CTN-0048, CTN-0049