The University of Pennsylvania Opening Opioid-use Research Center

Penn Medicine received a five-year $8.9 million grant by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to create a center dedicated towards studying opioid-use disorders.

The new Penn PET Addiction Center of Excellence will involve researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University’s PET Center and be the first of its kind to use “positron emission tomography imagining to investigate the neurobiology of people suffering from opioid-use disorders,” according to Penn Medicine.

Researchers are hopeful that this project will result in new interventions to treat opioid-use disorders.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) also renewed their five-year contract with the University of Pennsylvania’s gene therapy program for $13 million earlier this year to support gene-therapy research advancement. The University of Pennsylvania is a testament to the world-class research conducted here in Greater Philadelphia.