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, and addiction 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, and addiction 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.
