Ashley Addiction Treatment Opens Building Devoted Only to Research

Ashley Addiction Treatment has opened a freestanding building on its Havre de Grace, Maryland, campus that is given over entirely to addiction research, a facility its staff describe as the only one of its kind on the East Coast. The first study to run there will test whether a class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs can help people drink less when paired with an older alcoholism medication.

The building sits on Ashley's 147-acre waterfront campus overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, according to the organization. Unlike the rest of the campus, it houses no patients in treatment. Research staff work there on protocols that are meant to feed back into the residential and outpatient care delivered next door.

"Ultimately we want to get people better quicker and we want to keep them better for longer," Greg Hobelmann, Ashley's co-CEO, told WBAL NewsRadio. "And that's where the research fits in."

A building with no treatment beds in it

Dedicated research space is unusual for a treatment provider of Ashley's size, and the organization is describing the opening as a change in how it works rather than an increase in how many people it can admit. The center has measured patient outcomes for years through its clinical quality office, and the new building gives that measurement a home of its own.

"We measure a lot of things here and use that information to help maximize the outcomes each individual patient can achieve," said Dr. Wendy Insalaco, Ashley's director of clinical quality outcomes.

The building is separate from the campus's treatment beds, which means a protocol can run there without changing the care delivered to people in residence. Ashley has not said how many studies it expects to run at once or how the research unit will be staffed.

Why GLP-1s and naltrexone together

The protocol at the center of the new facility pairs a GLP-1 receptor agonist, the drug class that includes semaglutide, with naltrexone, which has been prescribed for alcohol use disorder for decades. Naltrexone blocks the opioid receptors involved in the reward people get from drinking; the GLP-1 drugs are being studied for their effect on craving more broadly.

"Food craving and drug craving lies in a similar control center of the brain, so it makes sense that it could also be effective at suppressing craving for drugs and other substances," said Jami Barney, Ashley's director of clinical research. She said patients prescribed GLP-1s for weight loss reported a side effect the field has since tried to turn into a treatment: "They were also getting this side effect that they were drinking less and smoking cigarettes less."

Barney said the combination could matter beyond alcohol. She described the synthetic drugs now reaching treatment programs as more addictive and more lethal than what the field trained on, and argued that prescribers need tools aimed at that population.

"These synthetic chemical compounds that are approaching us are more addictive, more lethal, and we need a way to stay at the head of the game when we're learning how to treat the folks that walk through our doors," she said. Of the naltrexone and GLP-1 pairing, she added: "I do think this has the potential to be groundbreaking."

The trial's principal investigator and timeline

The Johns Hopkins partnership places the study under Andrew S. Huhn, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the university, according to the ICH GCP clinical trials registry. Ashley said the trial is scheduled to begin in early 2027, with results expected roughly two years after it starts.

That schedule puts the first readout in 2029 at the earliest, well beyond the current news cycle. The trial does not begin until early 2027, so nobody entering treatment this fall can enroll in it.

For patients, the practical effect of the opening is indirect. Someone entering treatment for alcohol use disorder today will be offered the medications that are already standard — naltrexone among them, without any GLP-1 — through medication-assisted treatment programs. What the new building changes is who is asking the questions: a treatment organization running its own protocols on its own campus, rather than waiting for academic centers to publish findings it then has to put into practice.