Parsing out pain relief without the addiction

Everyone knows the biggest problem with the pain drugs is that the best ones tend to be addictive; highly addictive with painful physical withdrawals. In the ongoing race to build a better painkiller, scientists have tested mice with modified 5-HT neurons to see how this would affect pain control and addiction. The summary of the results are as follows:

"These findings demonstrate that opiates exert their analgesic effects through a serotonin mechanism but that serotonin is not responsible for the negative, addictive side effects associated with those pain-killing drugs," Chen says. "That was unexpected because serotonin has been known to interact with other neurotransmitters like dopamine or to modulate the levels of these neurotransmitters in the forebrain, which is important for reward-seeking behaviors." Chen says the finding raises the possibility that serotonergic neurons or opiate receptors on those neurons could be potential targets for opiate drugs that might suppress pain without risk of tolerance and drug addiction.

Although the mice in this study were genetically unique, if these findings can be corroborated this means we may see a whole new class of selective opiate agonists being developed to target specific subtypes associated with serotonin modulation. While I doubt the pharma people will ever develop a drug that targets one specific opiate receptor subtype while completely missing the others, you can sure bet millions (if not billions) of dollars will be spent chasing this dream. Of course, if all of this separating pain control from addiction is true, it also means that the opposite would be true: There is a theoretical drug out there that has absolutely no psychoactive or analgesic properties whatsoever, but is more addictive than heroin. Yikes!