In 2020, more than 278,000 people died from substance use disorder with over 91,000 of those from overdoses. Just three years later, deaths from overdoses alone rose by over 25,000. Despite its magnitude, the substance use disorder crisis still faces fundamental challenges: a prevailing societal stigma, lack of knowledge around its origin in the brain, and the slow pace of innovation in comparison to other diseases.
Work at MIT is contributing to meaningful innovations in the field of substance use disorder, according to Hanna Adeyema MBA '13, director of MIT Bootcamps at MIT Open Learning, and Carolina Haass-Koffler, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University.
Adeyema is leading an upcoming MIT Bootcamps Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Ventures program. She was the chief operating officer and co-founder of Tenacity, a startup based on research from the MIT Media Lab founded to reduce burnout for call center workers. Haass-Koffler is a translational investigator who coalesces preclinical and clinical research towards examining biobehavioral mechanisms of addiction and developing novel medications. She was a finalist for the 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Prize Competition, an award supporting female entrepreneurs in biotech and the winner of the 2024 Brown Biomedical Innovation to Impact translational commercial development program that supports innovative proof-of-concept projects. In 2023, Haass-Koffler produced a substance use disorder 101 course for the SUD Ventures program and secured non-dilutive funding from the NIH toward work in innovation in this area. Here, Adeyema and Haass-Koffler join in a discussion about the substance use disorder crisis and the future of innovation in this field.
Q: What are the major obstacles to making meaningful advances in substance use disorder research and treatment and/or innovation?
Adeyema: The complexity of the substance use disorder market and the incredible amount of knowledge required to innovate is a major obstacle to bringing research from the bench to market. Innovators must not only understand their technical domain in great detail, but also federal regulations, state regulations, and payers in the health care sector. On top of this, they must know how to pitch to specialized investors, how to sell to hospitals, and understand how to interact with vulnerable populations — often all at the same time.
Given this, solving the substance use disorder epidemic will require a multidisciplinary approach — from health care innovators to researchers to government officials and everyone in between. MIT is the right place to address innovation in the substance use disorder space because we have all of those talented people here and we know how to collaborate to solve societal problems at scale. An example of how we are working together in this way is the collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Drug Abuse to create the SUD Ventures program. The goal of this program is to fuel the next generation of innovation in substance use disorder with practical applications and a pipeline to securing non-dilutive government funding from Small Business Innovation Research grants.
Haass-Kolffer: Before even mentioning substance use disorder, there are a number of barriers in health care that already exist, such as health insurance reimbursement, limited availability of resources, shortage of clinicians, and more. Specifically in substance use disorder, there are additional barriers affecting patients, clinicians, and innovators. Barriers on the clinical side include, but are not limited to, lack of resources available to providers and lack of time for physicians to include additional substance use disorder assessments in the few minutes that they spend with a patient during a clinical visit. Then on the patient side, the population is often composed of individuals from low socio-economic groups, which adds issues related to stigma, confidentiality and lack of referral network, and generally hinder development of novel substance use disorder treatment interventions.
At a high level, we lack the integration of substance use disorder prevention, diagnostic, and treatment in health care settings. Without a more holistic integration, advancing substance use disorder research and innovation will continue to be extremely challenging. By creating a collaborative program where we can connect researchers, clinicians, and engineers, we have the opportunity to bring together a dynamic community of peers to tackle the biggest challenges in providing treatment of this debilitating disorder.
Q: How does the SUD Ventures program approach substance use disorder innovation differently?
Adeyema: Traditionally, innovation programs in the substance use disorder space focus on entrepreneurship and business courses for researchers and inventors. These courses focus on knowledge, rather than skills and practical application, and omit an important piece of building a business — it takes an entire ecosystem to build a successful startup, particularly in the health care space.
Our program will bring together the top U.S.-based substance use disorder researchers and experts in other disciplines. We hope to tap into MIT’s engineering excellence, clinical expertise from places like Massachusetts General Hospital, and other academic institutions like Harvard University and Brown University, which is a major center for substance use disorder research. With the vibrant entrepreneurship and biomedical expertise in the Boston ecosystem, we are excited to see how we can bring these incredible forces together. Participants will work together in teams to develop solutions in specific topic areas in substance use disorder. They are guided by MIT-trained entrepreneurs who have successfully funded and scaled companies in the health care space, and have access to a strong group of mentors like Nathaniel Sims, associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and the Newbower/Eitan MGH Endowed Chair in Biomedical Technology Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital.
We recognize the field has many idiosyncratic challenges, and it is also changing very, very fast. To shed light on the most recent and unique roadblocks, the SUD Ventures program will rely on industry case studies delivered by practitioners. These cases will be updated each year to contribute to a body of knowledge participants have access to not only during the program, but also after.
Q: Looking forward, what is the future of innovation in the substance use disorder field, and what are the promising innovations/therapies on the horizon?
Haass-Koffler: The opportunities to develop technologies to treat substance use disorder are infinite. Historically, the approach has been centered on neurobiology, focusing predominantly on the brain. However, substance use disorder is a complex disorder and lacks measurable biomarkers, which complicates its diagnosis and management. Given the brain's connections with other bodily systems, targeting interventions beyond the central nervous system offers a promising avenue for more effective treatment.
To improve the efficiency of treatment by both researchers and clinicians, we need technological advancements that can probe brain function and monitor treatment responses with greater precision. Innovations in this area could lead to more tailored therapeutic approaches, enable earlier diagnosis, and improve overall patient care.
Just as glucose monitoring changed lives by managing insulin delivery in diabetes, there is a significant opportunity to create similar tools for monitoring medication responses, drug cravings, and preventing adverse events in patients with substance use disorder, affecting their lives tremendously. The future for the substance use disorder crisis is two-fold: it’s about saving lives by preventing overdoses today and improving quality of life by supporting patients throughout their extended treatment journeys. We are innovating and improving on both fronts of the crisis, and I am optimistic about the progress we will continue to make in treating this disease in the next couple of years. With government and political support, we are improving people’s lives and improving society.
The program and its research are supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Cynthia Breazeal, a professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and dean for digital learning at MIT Open Learning, serves as the principal investigator (PI) on the grant.
