Researchers from the University of Michigan Health System have found a new approach to pain therapy that will dramatically lower painkiller dosages.
Patients with diseases and illness that can be very painful essentially consume painkillers like morphine and Vicodin to ease the pain. With time, the body becomes immune to these painkillers and hence they are not effective, resulting in patients consuming higher doses of painkillers that eventually prove harmful. Now, researchers from the University of Michigan Health System have found a new approach to pain therapy that would dramatically lower painkiller dosages.
Oxycodone and hydrocodone are two common drugs taken by patients experiencing moderate to severe pain in situations like the extraction of a wisdom tooth to cancer. The drug molecules attach themselves to opioid receptors in nerve cells present in the brain and spinal cord, which prevent a person from feeling the pain. Co-author John Traynor, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology at the U-M Medical School reveals in a press release that through the study, he and his colleagues were able to find compounds that bind to a different area of opioid receptors in nerve cells, which make them more effective without promoting any side effects.
He reveals that though the study is in its very early stages, he and his team are hopeful that the discovery of these new compounds could help revolutionize the treatment of pain and provide medication that proves to be effective even in lower dosages.
Painkillers currently available bind themselves to the orthosteric site of the opioid receptor. While this does relieve a person from pain, this site is also known to capture all the side effects of the drug and hence can prove to be dangerous. Contrarily, the newly discovered compounds were found to attach themselves to a physically distinct and previously unknown "allosteric" site on the opioid receptor. This not only allows the compounds to act at a location that hasn't been studied as a drug target before but also increases the effectiveness of painkillers like morphine.
