“We think this puts (OSU-CHS) in position to be on the level of (Houston’s) M.D. Anderson Cancer Center,” Hunter said then.

Three and a half years later, what is now the National Center for Wellness and Recovery (NCWR) is not quite there. People are not yet coming from all over the world for addiction treatment or to marvel at the latest advances in research.

But it might not be long before at least some of that is true.

With Wednesday National Opioid Awareness Day, officials say unexpected developments have changed the center’s trajectory, with research accelerating to the extent that the center could soon be involved in groundbreaking discoveries. The work is ramping up in several areas, but with particular enthusiasm for something akin to a pharmacological holy grail: a drug with the painkilling punch of opioids but not their life-threatening addictiveness.

“Will we do it? I think we will do it,” OSU-CHS President Johnny Stephens said in a recent interview. “Where we sit today … we have as good a chance as anybody in the world to make these discoveries.”

‘More of a forefront lead’

Amid the buzz surrounding the NCWR is talk of Tulsa becoming a hub for pharmaceutical development and manufacturing. OSU is spending $22 million — including $16 million from the 2019 settlement and its proceeds — to renovate space on its west Tulsa campus into a high-end lab. The Legislature is poised to approve $50 million from the state’s American Rescue Plan Act allocation for an OSU-CHS biotechnology and life sciences facility, probably next to the OSU Medical Center in downtown Tulsa, that will house a clinical trial unit for testing drugs developed in Oklahoma and elsewhere, officials say.

New Veterans Affairs and state-owned mental hospitals in downtown and a Tulsa location of the University of Oklahoma’s Stephenson Cancer Center are also pieces in an emerging metrowide biomedical initiative.

This has not come without some grumbling, particularly in regards to the Purdue settlement.

At the time of the agreement’s announcement, reaction included a good deal of anger and incredulity. Some of it was because more than 20% of the cash — $59.5 million — was going to the state’s private attorneys. A good deal of it was because the state’s power brokers — lawmakers, the governor, movers and shakers — had been left out.

And it was because almost all of the money was going to one small research office on the west side of Tulsa instead of being spread out across the state as Oklahoma battled a growing opioid addiction problem.

Early on, the center’s focus was on straightforward treatment and fairly basic research. Stephens says that will continue, but higher level research will become a larger share of the NCWR’s work.

“The last several years we’ve had a direct emphasis on treatment,” Stephens said. “We’ve tried to be forthcoming all along, though, that we didn’t see ourselves as being — that we needed to be complementary to the (treatment) offerings that were in the state of Oklahoma.”

Video medical assisted treatment — an arrangement with community mental health providers that connects rural Oklahomans with physicians licensed to prescribe addiction treatment drugs — has been one of OSU-CHS’s major projects in that area. It also operates clinical facilities in Tulsa and works with several nonprofit agencies.

“We’ll continue to do that,” said Stephens. “But research will continue to take more of a forefront lead.”

‘It was a cold call’

The terms of the 2019 settlement call for OSU-CHS to receive $197.5 million in cash and anti-addiction medication from Purdue and the Sackler family over five years. Those resources are to be used to combat opioid addiction through research and treatment.

But OSU-CHS wound up getting more than that. In a separate 2019 deal, OSU-CHS acquired 20 years of Purdue research, including some 20,000 experimental molecules and biosamples, on pain management and addiction. It also hired Purdue scientist Don Kyle, who led that research.

As Kyle and Stephens tell it, this was at the former’s initiative. Kyle was Purdue’s vice president of discovery research, focusing primarily on nonaddictive pain medication. But with Purdue in danger of being sued out of existence because of its role in the production and marketing of opioids, Kyle says he was told in 2019 that his unit would be shut down.

So after the Purdue-Oklahoma settlement, Kyle contacted Dr. Kayse Shrum, then president of OSU-CHS and now president of the entire OSU system, and Stephens, then CHS’ second-ranking administrator.

“Honestly, Kayse and I looked at each other like, ‘We’re not sure about this call from an employee of Purdue,’” Stephens said.

“It was a cold call,” Kyle said. “In retrospect, I’d probably never do that again. But somehow I was compelled to do it.”

Kyle says the idea of “20-some-odd years of research … just sitting in these little vials … I couldn’t take it.”

Long story short, Kyle convinced OSU and Purdue to transfer the research and ultimately himself to the National Center for Wellness and Recovery.

“I went back to the CEO of Purdue and said, ‘We just sent them like 20,000 molecules and a big database of information and all of this stuff,’” said Kyle. “’They’re never going to figure this out. But I’m the one who led all these programs and initiated all of this, and actually holds the patent on many of these things. Can we work out something where I can go down there and help integrate that into their strategy.’”

And so Kyle became the NCWR’s chief executive officer.

The laboratory space Kyle needs to continue his research in Tulsa is still about two years away, he and Stephens said, but through some of Kyle’s “former colleagues,” they compensated by entering into a partnership with the University of Arizona, which has a National Institute of Drug Abuse research facility.

“They were quite interested in some of the same brain circuitry and mechanisms for pain and addiction, but we have the molecules and some of the preliminary data, and they don’t have that,” said Kyle. “What they have is all of the biology and pharmacology that we want to build … but it’s going to take a couple of years to get it all on line.

“By doing that partnership, it really accelerates our ability to leverage the molecules … While we’re growing our own we don’t waste any time,” he said.

‘Expected a lot of hesitancy’

Finding nonaddictive pain medications is one of the center’s long-term research projects, but more immediately it is concentrating on a long-lasting reversal drug to counteract fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid finding its way not only into counterfeit painkillers but everything from marijuana to phony Adderall tablets.

Narcan, the most common opioid reversal drug, is effective but wears off far quicker than fentanyl, Kyle said. The idea is to find something as effective but longer-lasting.

“In our collection of molecules, we do have some candidates we’ll be profiling in the months ahead,” he said.

All of that, though, circles back to questions about creating new drugs to treat old drugs, and why OSU-CHS hired someone who worked in a company that developed some of those old drugs.

Kyle said he “expected a lot of hesitancy” when he broached the subject to OSU, but found “open minds” instead.

“In my role at Purdue Pharma, I was not involved in marketing or sales or branding products or training sales reps,” he said. “I didn’t do any of that. My sole purpose at Purdue Pharma was to research pain mechanisms and try to develop nonopioid, nonaddictive approaches to treating that. Those are the tools we’ve relocated here to OSU.”

“It’s not something we went into with our eyes closed,” Stephens said. “The reason for the lawsuit by the state of Oklahoma with Purdue was around the marketing. The sales. Don did not do that. He’s a researcher (with) a focus on nonopioid pain medications.

“I completely understand why it would look that way on an initial glance in, but once the research is in, Don’s the most qualified and best person in the world to come in and lead this initiative.”