Scientists discovered a new drug that could replace morphine and doesn’t have the potentially lethal side effects.
Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) discovered “PZM21” has the same pain relieving qualities of morphine, without the medical risks, and it is potentially non-addictive, The Daily Mail reported Wednesday.
“People have been searching for a safer replacement for standard opioids for decades,” Brian Shoichet, professor at UCSF and co-lead of the research, told The Daily Mail. The findings were published in the journal Nature.
The UCSF scientists used computers, instead of the trial and error method, to simulate “different configurations of millions of drug candidates,” in hopes of finding one that fit into the same receptors of the brain that hold morphine.
A staggering four trillion of these configurations were done by the UCSF team over the course of two weeks.
While scientists say PZM21 is “potentially” non-addictive, further tests need to be done to confirm and make sure it is safe in humans. They also say it could be a “game-changer” in addressing the current opioid epidemic.
The California Department of Health (CDH) notes that sales of opioid pain relievers, like morphine, quadrupled from 2002 to 2012. The CDH goes on to say that by 2012, “enough opioid pain relievers were sold to medicate every American adult (about 240 million people) every four hours for an entire month.”
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that since 1999, overdose deaths from opioids like morphine have nearly quadrupled.
FAIR Health recently released a study showing medical services for opioid dependency rose by an astonishing 3,000% between 2007 and 2014.
Morphine, which is an opioid medication synthesized from the highly potent opium plant, has been in use as an effective painkiller since the 1800s. Using it has always come with high risk because of its potency.
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