Opiorphin? Article:

[howlongisthenight]

Painkilling saliva beats morphine

* 18 November 2006
* From New Scientist Print Edition.

MEN'S saliva has yielded a painkiller three to six times as powerful as morphine. The team that isolated the substance, dubbed opiorphin, hope that it may spawn a new generation of painkillers without the negative addictive and psychological effects of morphine.

When Catherine Rougeot at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and her colleagues injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats' paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight gave the same pain relief as 3 grams of morphine. More dramatically still, rats needed six times as much morphine as opiorphin to become oblivious to the pain of other painful stimuli (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 17979).

Opiorphin is thought to work by stopping the destruction of natural opiates called enkephalins in nerve cells. The researchers say that opiorphin is such a simple molecule that it can be easily synthesised for further evaluation, rather than having to be isolated from saliva itself. Alternatively, it might be possible to find drugs that trigger the body to produce its own opiorphin.

From issue 2578 of New Scientist magazine, 18 November 2006, page 21





wow....... wouldn't it be cool to stop "natural opiates" from being destroyed?