China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) founded the Center for Addiction Medicine in October 2011, where Academia Sinica Fellow Ing-kan Ho was brought in to assist with its establishment, and the hospital's Department of Psychiatry Director Hsien-yuan Lane and Director Chieh-liang Huang served as the center's Director and Deputy Director, respectively, inviting the hospital doctors and school teachers to cooperate.
The center plans to conduct a comprehensive in-depth study of substance addiction, ranging from clinical pharmacokinetics and metabolism, evaluation of clinical symptoms of addictive diseases, to gene, cell, and animal models, exploring the causes and mechanisms leading to addictive diseases and further developing new alternative therapy for addiction treatment. The center has been scheduled to collect information about addicts’ pharmacokinetics, drug-metabolizing genes, and metabolic activity, pharmacodynamics, clinical reaction and follow-up assessments. Moreover, it has been working with major medical establishments and academic and research institutions to set up the cooperation network of domestic clinical medical institutions, and train addiction clinical research team to promote addiction research.
The new model of cooperation between units of hospitals and schools was initiated in the form of horizontal integration—setting up a cooperative model of "functional task-oriented grouping," based on close communication to turn the center into the first bidirectional translational research center for basic and clinical addiction studies across the nation.