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 Data Ecosystem, 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.

SPARC and Pennsieve Discover are both HEAL-compliant repositories. SPARC is specifically funded to support the NIH HEAL Initiatives for the RE-JOIN Program and the PRECISION Human Pain Network, and it is available to accept data from other HEAL Initiative projects.

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

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. Not sure if your HEAL Initiative dataset is right for SPARC? Contact us through this form or at [email protected]

If you are a HEAL investigator and your data does not fit the SPARC mission, you can select one of the other HEAL compliant repositories, such as Pennsieve Discover.

Why choose SPARC?

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.

We look forward to working with you and your HEAL Data Steward to help you make the best decision for your HEAL Initiative data.

Get started today!

If you are part of the NIH HEAL Initiatives for the RE-JOIN Program and the 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]