LOS ANGELES : Scientists, including one of Indian origin, have created a new drug that blocks pain without triggering potentially deadly side effects of current prescription painkillers.
Researchers, including Aashish Manglik from Stanford University, custom-engineered the drug from scratch, using computational techniques to explore more than four trillion different chemical interactions.
They used the atomic structure of the brain’s “morphine receptor” to develop the drug candidate that blocked pain as effectively as morphine in mouse experiments, but did not share the potentially deadly side effects typical of opioids.
The drug did not interfere with breathing – the main cause of death in overdoses of prescription painkillers as well as street narcotics like heroin – or cause constipation, another common opioid side effect, researchers said.
The drug also appears to side-step the brain’s dopamine-driven addiction circuitry and did not cause drug-seeking behaviour in mice.
More research is needed to confirm that the drug is safe and effective in humans, the scientists said.
Much of drug discovery begins by taking a successful drug like morphine and tweaking its structure to get rid of side effects while maintaining its primary function. The new study took a different, much more radical approach.
“We didn’t want to just optimise chemistry that already existed. We wanted to get new chemistry that would confer completely new biology,” said Brian Shoichet, a professor at University of California, San Francisco in the US. (AGENCIES)
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