May 31, 2023 | Angela Roberts
As the toll of America’s opioid epidemic continues to mount, the University of Maryland School of Medicine is preparing to open a new institute for addiction medicine, where researchers, substance use disorder specialists and doctors will work together to change the way addiction is treated, prevented and studied.
The Kahlert Institute for Addiction Medicine, which state and health care leaders announced at a press conference Wednesday, will be housed on the sixth floor of the recently opened Health Sciences Research Facility III on the medical school’s downtown Baltimore campus.
Its launch is being funded by a $10 million donation from the Maryland-based Kahlert Foundation, one of the largest donations in the medical school’s history and the biggest the foundation has ever given out. Additional funding from the University of Maryland, Baltimore and School of Medicine brings the foundation’s total starting budget to $30 million.
...
The carnage of the crisis disproportionately hurts people from marginalized communities and neighborhoods. Black people with substance use disorders, for instance, are far less likely to receive certain medications to treat the disease than white patients, said Dr. Sarah Kattakuzhy, who will be the institute’s deputy director. She is an associate professor in the Division of Clinical Care and Research at the medical school’s Institute of Human Virology.
Contact
Deborah Kotz
Senior Director of Media Relations
Office of Public Affairs & Communications
University of Maryland School of Medicine
DKotz@som.umaryland.edu
o: 410-706-4255
c: 410-804-0054
Related stories
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
Maryland Today: $3.8M NIH Grant Funds Expansion of Researcher’s Opioid Use Recovery Approach to Rural Maryland
A University of Maryland psychologist is taking the peer-based opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment model she and her team developed in Baltimore, Md., to the state’s Eastern Shore with the support of a $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The five-year study by psychology Associate Professor Jessica Magidson and Associate Professor Sarah Kattakuzhy, a physician at the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, is funded by the NIH HEAL Initiative.
Friday, October 07, 2022
Baltimore Business Journal: Leaders in Health Care 2022: Dr. Sarah Kattakuzhy and Dr. Elana Rosenthal, UM School of Medicine
Drs. Sarah Kattakuzhy and Elana Rosenthal were in the early stages of their careers when medications to cure hepatitis C had come to market, and at the same time, the opioid epidemic was exploding. They hadn’t yet met, but they’d each realized the same thing: they were treating patients for infections brought on by injecting opioids, but not getting to the root cause of infection, which was drug use.