$12M Grant to Advance Health for People Who Use Drugs in New England

“New England offers a compelling opportunity to conduct this work because the community has been heavily impacted by HIV, HCV, overdose and other harms tied to unregulated drug use,” said Angela Bazzi, Ph.D., M.P.H., professor at the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science.

“Working with community organizations is essential to engaging participants, ensuring the continued relevance of researchers’ questions, and gaining perspectives on local community needs, challenges and resources.”

Bazzi will guide community engagement, building on her long-standing research collaborations with New England community organizations and project co-leads Brandon Marshall, Ph.D., and Katie Biello, Ph.D., M.P.H., both professors at Brown University’s School of Public Health. The team also includes researchers from the University of Vermont and Brown University Health.

“We want to better understand how to improve the health and well-being of people who use drugs in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont — three states that have been heavily impacted by the overdose crisis and HIV/HCV epidemics,” said Marshall. “The ultimate goal is to create a feedback loop in which we share study findings with community partners to strengthen new and existing treatment and care programs.”

The study aims to recruit 1,200 participants and will focus on four key topics: trends in drug use; barriers to treatment and care for HIV and HCV and prevention of overdose; impacts of existing and new programs to address these outcomes; and how acute and chronic conditions, like mental health disorders, influence the well-being of people who use drugs.

According to Biello, only certain areas of the region have syringe services programs or drug treatment services. Others, especially outside the region’s major cities, have limited resources for people who use drugs.

“This grant will enroll a large group of people across three states and follow them for up to five years, allowing us to study complex questions that we’ve wanted to find answers to for a long time,” Biello said. “Health care access will be a major focus, and we intend to explore barriers to quality care in more traditional settings as well as in the innovative new programs that have been taking shape in these areas, such as the new overdose prevention center in Providence and syringe service programs that offer on-site HIV preventative medication to people who use drugs.”

The researchers also hope that, over time, the study will help them to rapidly identify infectious disease outbreaks and changes in drug use such as new contaminants in the drug supply that affect people’s health.

The project, which is launching in the fall of 2025, is part of a consortium of six NIDA-funded studies focused on HIV and substance use, and will be the first of its kind to be based in New England.

“This presents an exciting opportunity to shed some light on what's going on in these areas that haven’t been explored in the same way that urban areas have,” Marshall said.