To date, the efficacy of new treatments for drug addiction has been demonstrated primarily in specialized research settings, with somewhat restricted patient populations. To address this problem, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) established the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN). The CTN encourages investigators interested in drug abuse to use the CTNs clinical trials database to promote research.

Effective data sharing includes communicating to the research community that data are available, providing sufficient descriptive information about the data, enforcing compliance to standard semantics and structure, rendering the data in a usable format, and making data accessible.

Prior to de-identifying the data, all data files are converted from their native format to a modified Study Data Tabulation Model (SDTM) standard format. The SDTM is a content standard sponsored by the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC). This universal data format will be applied to each completed CTN trial's data. This will facilitate the pooling of shared data across completed studies.

De-identified data are available for download in two formats: SAS (CDISC SDTM transport files) and ASCII (CSV files). Documentation regarding the data and corresponding study that generated the data are also available under each completed protocol page. This includes the annotated case report form (CRF); a define.xml file outlining the structure, variables and contents of each dataset; and SDTM mapping and de-identification rules.