The mission of the Analgesic, Anesthetic, and Addiction Clinical Trial Translations, Innovations, Opportunities, and Networks (ACTTION) public-private partnership with the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is to identify, prioritize, sponsor, coordinate, and promote innovative activities — with a special interest in optimizing clinical trials — that will expedite the discovery and development of improved analgesic, anesthetic, addiction, and peripheral neuropathy treatments for the benefit of the public health.
ACTTION is a multi-year, multi-phase initiative that is closely aligned with the FDA's Critical Path Initiative. This public-private partnership has been designed to streamline the discovery and development process for new analgesic, anesthetic, addiction, and peripheral neuropathy medications and to more generally accelerate the development of treatments with improved efficacy and safety.
The key objectives of ACTTION involve initiating and supporting strategic collaborations among a broad spectrum of stakeholders — including, but not limited to, academia, the FDA and other government agencies, industry, professional organizations, patient advocacy groups, foundations, and philanthropic organizations — with the goals of sharing data and innovative thinking about the development of novel therapeutics. These strategic collaborations involve a wide range of research projects and other activities, for example, scientific workshops, consensus meetings, and in-depth analyses of clinical trial data to determine the effects of research methods on study assay sensitivity and efficiency.
ACTTION is intended to have benefits that are international in scope. To represent the bridges that ACTTION is establishing among its diverse stakeholders, this website is illustrated with watermarks of two bridges that share the distinction of connecting different continents. Directly below is the First Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, which connects Europe and Asia; on the Contact Us webpage is the Leifur Eiriksson Bridge in Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula, which spans a rift valley between the North American and European continental plates.
News
Feb 17, 2020: ACTTION to Present at World Congress on Pain, Amsterdam, August 4-8, 2020
- Jennifer Gewandter, PhD, ACTTION Assistant Director, will deliver a presentation on "Advantages, limitations, and considerations for composite outcome measures in chronic pain trials" at a workshop she is chairing on "Incorporation of pain intensity and physical and emotional functioning in primary outcomes of pain studies: a discussion of novel outcomes for basic and clinical research"
- Shannon Smith, PhD, ACTTION Senior Assistant Director, will deliver a presentation on "Improving assessment and reporting of pain intensity, function, and treatment safety in clinical trials" at a workshop she is chairing on "Increasing the efficiency and value of preclinical and clinical pain research to enhance the development of novel analgesic therapies for pain"
- Robert H. Dworkin, PhD, ACTTION Director, will deliver the John D. Loeser Distinguished Lecture Award, which "is intended to create a tradition that instructs, inspires, and challenges clinicians and researchers to understand human pain, and the suffering it produces, in the broadest ways possible." The title of his award lecture is "The greatest teacher, failure is: falsely positive, falsely negative, and falsely interpreted analgesic clinical trials"
April 2, 2019: ACTTION Reaches Milestone of 100 Publications
Since its launch in late 2010, ACTTION has published a total of 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. These articles cover a wide range of topics involving pain, sedation and anesthesia, addiction medicine, and peripheral neuropathy; complete references can be found here.
