NIH HEAL Initiative

The Helping to End Addiction Long-term® Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative®, is an NIH-wide effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis. The initiative funds over 1,000 projects nationwide. Researchers are taking a variety of approaches to address the opioid epidemic through understanding, managing, and treating pain, as well as improving prevention and treatment for opioid misuse and addiction (NIH HEAL Initiative May 2024).

As part of the NIH HEAL Initiative®, the HEAL Data Ecosystem was created to accelerate sharing HEAL-generated data and results with the broad community of researchers, health care providers, community leaders, policy makers, and other HEAL stakeholders. The HEAL Data Ecosystem achieves this by empowering researchers to make their HEAL-generated data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) through HEAL compliant repositories, which are then surfaced centrally by the HEAL Data Platform, enabling HEAL data to be searched, analyzed, and used to make new discoveries (HEAL Data Ecosystem May 2024).

SPARC is a HEAL-Compliant Repository

Together, the SPARC DRC has leveraged their individual Core resources, services, and collaborative relationships to build not just the SPARC Portal, but an ecosystem for the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and a community for its researchers. SPARC uses the Pennsieve, built by the DRC's DAT-Core, to provide its core repository functionality for storing, managing, privately sharing, and publishing SPARC datasets to the SPARC Portal for public access. Learn more about the SPARC Portal Data Repository Structure. Learn more about our partnership here.

SPARC is the designated repository for the NIH HEAL RE-JOIN Program and the NIH HEAL PRECISION Human Pain Network. Additionally, SPARC and Pennsieve are available to accept data from other HEAL studies outside of these networks.

Why choose SPARC?

SPARC's mission and vision focuses on "Bridging the Body and the Brain" by supporting data integration within the domain of the peripheral nervous system. SPARC Standards set SPARC datasets apart from other repositories, providing professional curation, enriching the data through knowledge management and integration opportunities with other SPARC Applications, like functional and connectivity mapping through MAP-Core and computational modeling through SIM-Core. SPARC also provides additional outreach to the SPARC Scientific Community, increasing your data’s community impact.

How do I know if SPARC is right for my HEAL Initiative dataset?

If your dataset falls within SPARC’s domain, we're likely a good fit! If not, you can select one of the other HEAL compliant repositories.

Still not sure if your HEAL dataset is right for SPARC? We're here to help! Contact us through this form or at [email protected]

Get started today!

If you are part of NIH HEAL RE-JOIN Program and the NIH HEAL PRECISION Human Pain Network, the SPARC DRC has been funded to support your data sharing. Get started by requesting access to your network's dedicated Pennsieve workspace so you can create new datasets yourself - just following the dataset Submission Walkthrough

Have questions about how SPARC can support your research? Contact us through this form or at [email protected]