More good news in the battle against opioid addiction.
Scientists have reopened research into a class of opioids that were once shelved from study — and have discovered a variant that’s a powerful pain reliever, but potentially much safer for sustained use.
Though research into nitazenes, a long-overlooked synthetic opioid compound, was cut short in the 1950s because of their “extreme potency and overdose risk,” a team of researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has brought them back under the microscope.
What they’ve found — a new opioid known as N-desethyl-fluornitrazene (DFNZ) — may one day provide an alternative to pain medications like morphine, oxycodone, codeine and fentanyl, offering the same boost of pain relief, or analgesia, without the threat of serious addiction or withdrawal.
DFNZ may also be used as a treatment for opioid addiction, as its therapeutic effects have proven comparable to methadone without presenting the same negative impact on the respiratory system.
Researchers noted that DFNZ produced “a moderate and sustained increase in brain oxygen” rather than causing a slow, shallow breathing rate during clinical trials involving rats.
Plus, irritability was the only one of 14 classic opioid withdrawal symptoms identified in DFNZ-treated rats.
Even more promising, administering several doses of DFNZ did not trigger dependency or withdrawal, the researchers observed.
The researchers developed a protocol to determine the drug’s rewarding effects in the treated rats, who were trained to press a lever each time they wanted another dose.
The rats did self-administer some DFNZ, signaling the drug is tied to a rewarding effect.
But when DFNZ was replaced with a saline solution, the rats stopped going back for more.
That’s a stark difference to the compulsive nature of other opioids, such as heroin, morphine and fentanyl, which causes animals to continue to press the lever even after the drug is removed.
The dual epidemics of chronic pain and opioid addiction in the US present an urgent need for alternative drugs.
In 2023, some 80,000 people died from an opioid overdose nationwide.
Additionally, more than 125 million Americans live with acute or chronic pain, according to a scientific paper published in the Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology in 2018.
“The development of effective alternatives to opioids […] offers the best long-term solution for controlling and ultimately eradicating this epidemic,” one of the authors of that research wrote.
The opioids available to patients today are marred by a long list of potential adverse side effects like respiratory depression, constipation, tolerance, dependence, withdrawal and addiction.
Speaking about the new findings, Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, said that opioid pain medications are “essential for medical purposes, but can lead to addiction and overdose. Developing a highly effective pain medication without these drawbacks would have enormous public health benefits.”
