A Safer Opioid? Scientists Use Sodium To Reduce Harmful Effects of Fentanyl - SciTechDaily

A mouse and cell study has yielded promising results, offering hope that scientists may be able to mitigate the harmful effects of fentanyl, the world’s deadliest opioid, and potentially other drugs as well.

In the 1990s, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of fentanyl to ease severe pain in cancer patients but it has since made its way into the streets, worsening the national crisis of opioid abuse.

“In its current form, fentanyl is like a weapon of mass destruction,” said Vsevolod Katritch, a computational scientist at the Bridge Institute at USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience and a corresponding author of the study.

Katritch noted that he and his fellow scientists Ray Stevens and Vadim Cherezov at the Bridge Institute and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences have been looking at the potential of the sodium mechanism since they first identified it within adenosine and opioid receptors about a decade ago.

Katritch and his collaborators said that although further study is needed to prove that their less harmful version of fentanyl will work in humans, the results have opened a new door for scientists to potentially improve the safety of painkillers.

Reference: “Structure-based design of bitopic ligands for the µ-opioid receptor” by Abdelfattah Faouzi, Haoqing Wang, Saheem A. Zaidi, Jeffrey F. DiBerto, Tao Che, Qianhui Qu, Michael J. Robertson, Manish K. Madasu, Amal El Daibani, Balazs R. Varga, Tiffany Zhang, Claudia Ruiz, Shan Liu, Jin Xu, Kevin Appourchaux, Samuel T. Slocum, Shainnel O. Eans, Michael D. Cameron, Ream Al-Hasani, Ying Xian Pan, Bryan L. Roth, Jay P. McLaughlin, Georgios Skiniotis, Vsevolod Katritch, Brian K. Kobilka and Susruta Majumdar, 30 November 2022, Nature.