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While the United States continues to struggle against a growing number of opioid addicts who have already been prescribed powerful painkillers because of various ailments, the medical community is stuck between the hammer and the anvil. As pain medications, opioids are incredibly powerful, but they also create a strong addiction and alternatives are hard to find.
French researchers now think they have developed something that could help. It is a new type of "nano-drug" pain reliever that partially replicates the action of opioid-based drugs such as morphine, while providing less risky relief from abuse and abuse.
As the team explains in a new article published in Progress of science, the development of the drug was based on compounds that bind to the same receptors as opioids. Much of the work in this area was unsuccessful because of the difficulty of developing a drug that could cross the blood-brain barrier, so the team tried a different approach.
Rather than focusing on the brain, researchers have instead developed their drug to target the localized area that causes discomfort. The new drug has been tested in mice with leg pains. It turned out not only effective, but it also seemed to last longer than the opioid – based alternative.
By targeting the peripheral nervous system for the relief of pain rather than the brain, the drug could eliminate pain while being much less addictive than many modern painkillers. It would be applied directly to the affected areas, instead of taking a pill that would numb the whole body and the "high" often badociated with such drugs.
The researchers say that more work needs to be done before the drug can be tested on humans, but that sounds promising.
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