An opioid that blocks pain and the potential for addiction

If human brains and mice brains are anything alike, there might be away to use opioids to kill pain but bypass the possibility of its users to get high, thereby avoiding addiction and abuse, according to WBEZ.  

Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine are examining ways to get an opioid-like drug to stick to the pain-blocking receptors of the mu-opioid receptor in the brain, but avoid the euphoria-causing and dependence-creating parts of it. So far, one of their options seems to be working on mice: they’re less dependent, they see fewer withdrawal symptoms, don’t seem to become high and don’t have suppressed breathing that can come from opioids such as morphine.

The research stems from a 2000 discovery that the protein beta-arrestin can be disentangled from the brain’s normal opioid response (which originally seemed to be an all-or-nothing mechanism), allowing the drugs to block pain but not necessarily induce pleasure.

Check out WBEZ to see the researchers’ methods and early speculations of what such a drug could mean for pain management with the U.S. struggling with an opioid addiction epidemic.