The mission of the Analgesic 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 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 medications and to more generally accelerate the development of pain 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 analgesic clinical trial data to determine the effects of research methods on study assay sensitivity and efficiency.
The limitations of existing pain treatments are an international concern, and 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
April 23, 2012: ACTTION Announces Successful First Round of Industry Sponsorship
ACTTION is very pleased to announce that the following nine companies are providing support for and will be closely collaborating on its activities and initiatives for 2012 and beyond: Astellas, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Covidien, Depomed, Eli Lilly, Horizon, Jazz, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer. In addition, agreements to support ACTTION are currently being signed or are in various stages of development with six other companies.
April 16, 2012: Drs. Daniel Carr and David Lee to serve as Co-Chairs of ACTTION Board of Advisors
Daniel Carr, MD, Saltonstall Professor of Pain Research and Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine, Anesthesiology, Medicine, and Molecular Physiology and Pharmacology at Tufts University School of Medicine, and David A. H. Lee, MD, PhD, FFPM, MRCP, Senior Strategic Advisor, Endo Pharmaceuticals, will be serving as Co-Chairs of the ACTTION Board of Advisors and will represent the Board on the ACTTION Executive Committee.
March 15, 2012: Dr. Bob Rappaport Highlights ACTTION in Keynote Lecture
In a keynote lecture presented at the International Research Symposium on Innovative Therapies for Peripheral Neuropathies held in Chicago, Dr. Bob Rappaport, Director of the FDA’s Division of Anesthesia, Analgesia, and Addiction Products, discussed the background, objectives, and activities of the ACTTION public-private partnership.
During his presentation, Dr. Rappaport emphasized the importance of facilitating national and international collaborations among stakeholders interested in improving pain treatments. He highlighted the activities sponsored by ACTTION as an example of the benefits of such collaborations. These collaborative efforts include analyses of pooled legacy data provided by FDA and industry, identifying more efficient clinical trial designs, exploring biomarkers and patient phenotyping, and developing training materials for clinical trial subjects and staff. Dr. Rappaport concluded that these activities and other initiatives sponsored by ACTTION -- for example, a series of consensus meetings and scientific workshops -- have great potential to expand the therapeutic armamentarium for patients with acute and chronic pain and to accelerate the development of mechanism-based treatments.
Dr. Rappaport’s keynote lecture is available here.
