St Andrews expands work on addiction and gambling harms
Six months after launching, the University of St Andrews addiction medicine innovation hub has secured significant funding, published its approach in a leading journal and built a growing network of partners across healthcare, research and industry. The hub works across both substance use and behavioural addictions, including gambling.
Launched in December 2025, the Innovation, Design, Entrepreneurship, Action and Systems (IDEAS) Hub for Addiction Medicine brings together expertise from the University of St Andrews Business School and School of Medicine. It grew out of the Innovation in Addiction Medicine Summit, held at St Andrews in September 2025, where more than 50 experts designed a blueprint for a permanent centre dedicated to turning ideas into practical solutions through collaboration across schools, universities and disciplines.
The hub was co-founded by Dr Gosia Mitka, Senior Lecturer in the University of St Andrews Business School’s Department of Economics and Vice-Dean Engagement, Partnerships and Social Responsibility, Professor Alexander Baldacchino, Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Addictions, and Joe Schofield, Research Fellow in the School of Medicine. They continue to lead the initiative together.
The largest award so far is £150,000 from UK Research and Innovation for Research and Innovation in Gambling and Substance Use (RIGS St Andrews), a 12-month project exploring gambling-related harms among people with substance use disorders. The findings will underpin a bid for a four-year, £5 million second phase. The Scottish Council on Global Affairs also awarded £3,000, matched with in-kind support from the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre and backed by Research Data Scotland, to explore Scotland’s role in global innovation in addiction care. The project has already produced a published report and podcast. A two-year Laidlaw Foundation scholarship is also supporting research into the role of martial arts in community-based addiction recovery.
In July 2026, the team published its framework in Current Opinion in Psychiatry. The paper sets out a “twin-engine” model that combines research with innovation to tackle addiction more effectively. It focuses on earlier overdose detection, improved monitoring of drug-related harms through wastewater analysis and linked data, and ensuring new ideas are translated into everyday healthcare.
The hub has also supported entrepreneurs from the Reducing Drug Deaths Innovation Challenge (2023 to 2026) as they prepared bids for the £20 million Contracts for Innovation programme in drug and alcohol addiction healthcare.
Earlier this year, Professor Baldacchino and Dr Mitka represented Scottish expertise in addiction innovation at the European Union Drugs Agency Technology Foresight Workshop in Lisbon, where Professor Baldacchino delivered the keynote address. In September 2026, the team will co-organise the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM) Global Addiction Therapeutics Innovation Day in Rotterdam alongside the annual ISAM Global Congress.
The hub’s work also featured at the European Network on Research, Training and Education in Mental Health (ENTER) conference in Lausanne in June 2026. Dr Mitka delivered the closing keynote, while Joe Schofield, an ENTER board member, presented joint work with ISAM on global approaches to treating opioid use disorder through telemedicine.
Alongside its research, the hub has built a growing network of partners spanning universities, healthcare organisations and international bodies. Academic collaborators include the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow, the University of Lausanne, UT Southwestern Medical Center and Flinders University. Health partners include NHS Fife, NHS Education for Scotland, the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre, and Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust’s National Problem Gambling Clinic. International partners include the World Health Organization and the World Psychiatric Association.
Dr Mitka said:
“The summit produced a blueprint. Six months on, the real test is whether any of it has moved, and it has. We have projects running, funding in place, and a framework that other people can read, challenge and build on. That matters more than the individual numbers, because it means the model is now something we can be held to rather than something we are simply describing.”
Professor Baldacchino said:
“Scotland records around 2,500 drug and alcohol deaths every year, and the drug-related death rate is four times that of the UK. Those figures reflect systems that react rather than anticipate. What we have built here is a route for detection and treatment ideas to reach services instead of stopping at publication.”
Joe Schofield said:
“A key strength of the IDEAS hub is our ability to connect expertise across the university with our European and international partners. We are building collaborations around shared challenges and developing innovative solutions that are designed to transform the ways we understand and respond to addiction.”