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Addiction Healthcare Goals

Updated 14 October 2025

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What we do

The health and wider societal costs to society in England of illegal drug use is approximately £20 billion per year, with the harms from alcohol use estimated to cost over £27 billion. Since 2012 the number of drug-related deaths has more than doubled, and there are now approximately 5,000 UK deaths annually due to drug misuse. In addition, there are over 10,000 annual UK deaths from alcohol a figure which has been rising since 2019. Over 300,000 people are addicted to heroin and crack cocaine alone in England with 600,000 dependent on alcohol. The capacity of the treatment system has been increasing recently but is currently still insufficient to meet the need for alcohol support.

The Addiction Healthcare Goals, (announced as part of the UK’s Drug Strategy: From Harm to Hope), launched in November 2022 and delivered as one of the Office for Life Sciences’ Healthcare Goals programmes, is aiming to make the UK a place where researchers and industry in addiction healthcare can thrive and partner effectively with NHS and Third Sector treatment providers to design, research and deploy innovative treatments and technologies which effectively tackle the challenges of drug and alcohol addictions, saving and improving the lives of those affected, and reducing the harms to the individual, their family and friends, and wider society.

The Addiction Healthcare Goals programme is delivering on two key areas:

• Unleashing Innovation: award funding to catalyse development and approval of innovations that effectively treat drug & alcohol addictions​, improve and sustain recovery, and prevent harm and deaths from problematic drug & alcohol use​.

• Creating a Pioneering Drug and Alcohol Research Ecosystem: create a pioneering, UK-wide capability within Third Sector and NHS treatment providers, the criminal justice system, and community settings to evaluate, trial, and deploy all types of drug & alcohol addiction treatments and technologies.

Addiction Healthcare Goals Research Ecosystem: catalysing innovative addiction research across the UK.

To date the programme has:

  • Launched the Addiction Healthcare Goals Research Leadership Programme, backed by over £10 million of funding, to create a UK-wide pipeline of future leaders in addiction research. This initiative aims to build research leadership capacity, expand the scale of addiction research, and develop a diverse cohort of addiction research leaders across the UK. The programme will support a portfolio of awards from MSc to post-doctoral level that will be delivered through three streams: The Flagship Scheme led by the Society for the Study of Addiction; Partnership awards delivered through the National Institute for Health and Care Research Academy; and jointly funded research fellowships delivered by the Medical Research Council.

  • Commissioned a UK-wide review of addiction research in the criminal justice system (CJS) to explore how to enable and enhance research into innovative addiction treatments within CJS settings. This review will go beyond current assumptions and speculation, offering a deep dive into the real-world challenges and opportunities for conducting research in the CJS. It will provide robust evidence to inform future policy, identify practical solutions to existing barriers, and uncover best practices and opportunities that can be shared and scaled across the system. The review will also identify the partners best placed to implement these solutions, ensuring that recommendations are actionable and grounded in the realities of undertaking research in the CJS.

  • Commissioned a UK-wide review to develop the development of a comprehensive Addiction Research Data Roadmap, aimed at identifying solutions to tackle the key challenges researchers face when accessing and using addiction healthcare data in research. This project will map the current data landscape, identify barriers to effective data use, and propose practical solutions and initiatives to improve data access, linkage, and governance across the UK. The roadmap will include extensive engagement with partners, including people with lived experience, treatment providers, and data owners, to understand attitudes and concerns around data usage in research. It will also explore opportunities to strengthen the data ecosystem with the findings inform future policy decisions.
  • Launched an Accelerated Knowledge Transfer scheme with Innovate UK to support 3-month partnership projects between researchers, industry and treatment providers. 90% grants of up to £35,000 are available for projects focused on questions linked to making improvements to drug and alcohol addiction treatment, recovery and harm reduction or prevention. This scheme has now closed to applicants. Further details on the awards will be provided when available.
  • Launched the £5 million Reducing Drug Deaths Innovation Challenge in partnership with the Scottish government to catalyse the development of innovations to improve detection of, response to, and intervention in potentially fatal drug overdoses, to prevent deaths. Twelve UK projects were awarded funding to complete prototype feasibility research in 2023. In September 2024, seven of these projects were awarded phase 2 funding to further develop and demonstrate their innovations in real world settings. The innovations supported include wearables and sensor technology, novel antidote formulations, and AI enabled applications and tools.
  • Launched the £10 million Addiction Healthcare Goals: Innovation for Treatment and Recovery i4i awards (AMI), delivered with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, to support the creation of innovative medicines and technologies to help treat people with opioid or cocaine addictions and aid in their recovery. Four projects have been awarded funding to conduct 3-year research projects on innovations including virtual reality, assisted psychotherapies, prison release engagement and opioid substitution therapies.
  • Conducted a Priority Setting Partnership (PSP) with the James Lind Alliance (JLA) to enable healthcare professionals, those people with experience of addictions or who use alcohol or drugs problematically, carers and families to work together to identify and prioritise the questions for future research that will make the most difference to the lives of people with experience of addiction and their families and carers. Following two surveys and a workshop of people with lived experience, carers, families and healthcare professionals to prioritise the communities research questions, a Top 10 list of key unanswered research questions has been identified. These priorities have been published on the JLA website and will be used to guide future government funding and wider research.
  • Partnered with Collective Voice to convene voluntary sector drug and alcohol treatment and recovery organisations for two roundtable discussions on the barriers to, and facilitators of, voluntary sector engagement with research and on improving research career opportunities. Read the recent Collective Voice blog and report which followed the research careers roundtable here. The earlier briefing which followed the research engagement roundtable can be found here. These reports and ongoing engagement with this sector is helping to guide the future work of the Addiction Healthcare Goals.
  • Collaborated with the Mental Health Research Incubator, to offer research placements, internships and development opportunities. Eight addiction researchers were supported through the 2024 GROW Researcher Development Programme and the 2025 GROW programme is again open to applications from the addiction field. In addition, the Incubator is providing funding to support 3-month research projects within addiction services and research groups.
  • Partnered with the NIHR Innovation Observatory to conduct an horizon scan, aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of emerging global innovations in MedTech, pharmaceuticals, and psychedelics for the treatment and recovery from drug and alcohol addictions. This report, which includes insights from ongoing research studies and clinical trials, has now been published.

Who we are

The Addiction Healthcare Goals programme is Chaired by Professor Anne Lingford-Hughes.

I want to make the UK a place where researchers and innovative companies in addiction can thrive and partner effectively with NHS and 3rd sector treatment delivery services to design, research and deploy novel treatments and technologies which effectively tackle the challenges of drug and alcohol addictions, improving the lives of those affected, and reducing the harms to the individual, their family and friends and wider society.

Professor Anne Lingford-Hughes, May 2023.

Anne Lingford-Hughes, Chair of the Addiction Healthcare Goals.

Anne Lingford-Hughes is Professor of Addiction Biology at the Division of Psychiatry at Imperial College London. She is also a Consultant Psychiatrist at Central North West London NHS Foundation Trust and leads the MRC Addiction Research Clinical Training Programme (MARC) with Prof Colin Drummond, Kings College London, and Prof Matt Hickman, University of Bristol.

Professor Lingford-Hughes has contributed to NICE guidance regarding pharmacotherapy of opiate detoxification and alcohol misuse and dependence, co-developed British Association for Psychopharmacology guidelines about the pharmacological management of substance misuse and addiction and comorbidity with psychiatric disorders where she held the role of Hon. General Secretary, and has recently held the role of Chair of the Academic Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatry.

Contact details

You can contact the Addiction Healthcare Goals by email: addictionhealthcaregoals@officeforlifesciences.gov.uk.

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