The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) aims to enhance pain management and accelerate the discovery and development of new non-addictive pain therapeutics as part of the recently launched NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, a trans-agency effort to provide scientific solutions to the opioid crisis. With NIH HEAL Initiative support, the NINDS Preclinical Screening Platform for Pain (PSPP) has been set up to accelerate identification of novel approaches to treat both acute and chronic pain conditions. Under NINDS direction, preclinical testing of submitted agents is performed by contract facilities on a blinded and confidential basis at no cost to the PSPP participants. Test candidates are evaluated in a suite of in vivo pain-related assays as well as drug abuse liability following in vitro receptor profiling, pharmacokinetic, and side-effect profile assessment. In vivo pain-related assays include models of acute to chronic pain and persistent pain mechanisms, as well as specific models of neuropathic, nociceptive and neuroplastic pain. A key feature of the PSPP is the flexibility to continuously acquire and validate innovative new models and endpoints that more closely represent human pain conditions. PSPP provides researchers from academia and industry, in the US and internationally, an efficient, rigorous, one-stop in vivo screening resource to identify and profile novel non-opioid, non-addictive therapeutic candidates, including small molecules, biologics, natural products and devices for the treatment of pain. This presentation will elaborate on the progress made within this novel non-opioid, non-addictive pain therapeutic discovery and development program and its efforts to engage the drug discovery and device development community.