Ashish Thakrar
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Every year, people with opioid use disorder (OUD) are admitted to US hospitals about 500,000 times for medical or surgical care. These stays often go badly.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
opioid use disorder
fentanyl
methadone
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- Conduct a dose-finding study to identify the maximum tolerated methadone loading dose for people with opioid use disorder who use fentanyl, to guide future studies.
- Run a randomized pilot trial of methadone loading-dose initiation in hospitalized patients with fentanyl OUD, measuring trial feasibility, clinical outcomes such as withdrawal and early discharge, and safety.
- Assess whether hospitalized patients find methadone loading-dose initiation acceptable, along with other patient-centered outcomes, using interviews and a survey.
More about the research
Withdrawal goes untreated, 11–17% of patients leave before doctors advise, and fewer than 10% go home on medication for OUD. Methadone, a long-acting opioid medication, treats withdrawal and lowers the risk of death when given at adequate doses. Yet there is little evidence on how to start it for people who use fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid. The usual outpatient approach often fails to control fentanyl withdrawal and takes weeks to reach effective doses.
Why it matters
Hospitalized patients with opioid use disorder who use fentanyl often suffer untreated withdrawal and leave without ongoing treatment. A safe methadone loading-dose strategy could control withdrawal faster and keep more patients in care. It could also connect them to methadone treatment after discharge, establish a new dosing paradigm, and inform how hospital-based addiction trials are designed.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anne Black
Yale University, CT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure how time to a medically significant fall relates to current and cumulative methadone dose among VA patients who started methadone for opioid use disorder between 2016 and 2025.
Shadi Nahvi
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Develop a flexible methadone treatment intervention for opioid use disorder using input from stakeholders such as patients and clinicians, aiming at more patient-centered care.
Caleb Miles
Columbia University, NY·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop simple parametric and semiparametric efficient estimators of the average treatment effect in multi-study, multi-outcome data fusion, using related follow-up measurements as proxies for outcomes missing in some trials.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.