FORE has awarded five grants totalling more than US$2m to expand prevention, treatment and data efforts tackling the opioid and overdose crisis.
The New York University Grossman School of Medicine will receive US$369,285 to scale its Prevention Education Partnership — a school-based opioid education and overdose response programme — with Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and to create a digital toolkit for wider use.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will receive US$597,000 to build a national drug-checking data harmonisation and laboratory expansion initiative led by Nabarun Dasgupta, standardising how programmes classify and share findings. Drug checking refers to laboratory analysis of street drugs to identify contents and contaminants.
At the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Matthew Eisenberg and Sachini Bandara will lead a US$595,878 study mapping adoption of buprenorphine in emergency departments and emergency medical services, identifying barriers and producing a toolkit for hospitals and policymakers, including how Medicaid pays for EMS-initiated treatment. Buprenorphine is a medicine for opioid use disorder that reduces cravings and withdrawal.
The Essential Hospitals Institute will receive US$293,495 to run a 12-month learning collaborative for safety-net hospitals to develop multi-generational approaches to opioid use disorder prevention, treatment and recovery, with emphasis on perinatal and intergenerational support.
A US$199,980 grant to Pregnancy Justice, with Doing Right at Birth, will establish a Perinatal Substance Use Disorder Legal-Scientific Resource Hub to provide legal and policy professionals with peer-reviewed medical and public health evidence.
“These grants reflect FORE’s commitment to supporting innovative, evidence-based solutions across generations and settings,” said Karen A. Scott, president of FORE. “From protecting adolescents in schools and supporting pregnant patients to enhancing emergency care and improving access to timely data, these projects share a goal of saving lives, reducing stigma, and building sustainable systems for recovery.”
“Youth overdose deaths, often linked to fentanyl and counterfeit pills, remain at historically high levels,” said Larissa Laskowski, assistant professor at NYU Grossman and founding director of PEP. “By partnering with schools and training both students and staff, we are equipping young people and their communities with life-saving knowledge and skills.”
