A WORD TO THE WISE...:

A team of researchers, whose work was published earlier this month in Nature, designed a compound named PZM21 that is producing promising results. Multiple experiments on mice appear to reduce pain without slowing down breathing or being addictive. When the rodents treated with the compound were placed on a hot plate, for example, they appeared to experience as much pain relief as those treated with morphine. Mice showed no preference between being in a chamber where they received PMZ21 and another where they received a saline solution.

Rather than tweaking an existing drug, as most drugs are created, the research team used a combination of computational modeling and synthetic drug generation to design a compound from scratch that would bind well with the known structure of the brain's opioid receptors. Doing so was a four-year effort, involving researchers from Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California-San Francisco, and Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.

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