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An opioid minus major side effects

2017; American Chemical Society; Volume: 95; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1021/cen-09510-notw4

2474-7408

Bethany Halford,

Pain Management and Opioid Use

When given to rats, a new opioid relieves their pain but doesn't cause the negative side effects typically associated with this class of analgesic, such as addiction, respiratory depression, and constipation (Science 2017, DOI: 10.1126/science.aai8636). "These things are big problems when we treat patients for long periods of time with opioids," says Christoph Stein, a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Free University of Berlin, who led the research. Stein's group has spent more than 25 years studying opioid receptors on neurons outside the brain and spinal cord. These receptors, he says, become more active at sites of injury or inflammation. Knowing that pH is lower at such sites and that therefore more protons are floating around, Stein teamed up with Marcus Weber at Zuse Institute Berlin to computationally model what the extra protons might be doing to the binding behavior of opioids. They found that the