A promising new painkiller could potentially have longer-lasting effects, and could even act as an anesthetic alternative.
Most common painkillers are only "short-term fixes," and come with a variety of side effects, the University of Missouri Health System reported. A newly-discovered compound could offer much longer term painkilling effects.
"Because of its versatility and effectiveness at quickly numbing pain in targeted areas, lidocaine has been the gold standard in local anesthetics for more than 50 years," said George Kracke, associate professor of anesthesiology and perioperative medicine at the MU School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "While lidocaine is effective as a short-term painkiller, its effects wear off quickly. We developed a new compound that can quickly provide longer lasting relief. This type of painkiller could be beneficial in treating sports injuries or in joint replacement procedures."
To create the new compound, a team of researchers synthesized boronicaine as a derivative of the common painkiller lidocaine. They changed aspects of the chemical structure of lidocaine, creating a compound that could relieve pain for five times longer. In a pre-clinical study, boronicaine proved to relieved pain for about 25 minutes, compared to the five minutes of relief achieved by lidocaine.
"Although some conditions may warrant the use of a short-lasting painkiller, in many cases a longer lasting anesthetic is a better option," Kracke said. "Having a longer lasting anesthetic reduces the dosage or number of doses needed, limiting the potential for adverse side effects."
Some pain relievers on the market today can provide longer pain relief than lidocaine, but have been linked to serious side effects such as heart toxicity and gastrointestinal problems. These early findings suggest there is no toxicity associated with a single dose of boronicaine.
"Boronicaine could have distinct advantages over existing painkilling medications," said National Academy of Sciences member M. Frederick Hawthorne, director of MU's International Institute of Nano and Molecular Medicine. "We're conducting more research into the side effects of the compound, but in time it could very well become a useful material to use as an anesthetic."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal ChemMedChem.
