A potent new prescription painkiller free of side effects and addictive properties could be only a year or two away from hitting the market.
At least, that's the lofty promise of a group of Stony Brook University scientists, who say their drug won't be habit-forming -- like existing opiate-based painkillers including Percocet,Rift Gold Vicodin and others -- because it doesn't engage the central nervous system.
Instead, it works through different pathways involving peripheral nerves.
"This offers a major paradigm shift in the control of pain," one of the researchers, Simon Halegoua, said in a statement.RIFT Platinum "Since the central nervous system is taken out of the equation, there would be no side effects and no addictive qualities."
But AOL Health's addiction expert, Dr. Petros Levounis, thinks that's a tall order.
"You cannot really say that," Levounis, the director of The Addiction Institute of New York at St. Luke's and Roosevelt Hospitals, told AOL Health. "We have been burned in the past. We have had medications that were touted as non-addictive."
He cited the painkiller Ultram (generic name Tramadol),rift gold the sleeping pill Ambien (Zolpidem) and the sexual enhancer Viagra (Sildenafil) as drugs marketed as non-habit-forming that turned out to be either physically or psychologically addictive.
In their research, Halegoua, a Stony Brook professor of neurobiology and behavior, and his colleagues identified a new channel, PN1 (short for peripheral neuron 1), that factors into transmitting pain.
They're set to work developing a drug that would block the pathway, which they predicted would alleviate pain. That's different from the way traditional prescription painkillers work.
"When a patient is given an opiate like morphine, pain signals are still transmitted from sensory nerves to the central nervous system," Halegoua said. RIFT Platinum"Morphine action throughout the brain reduces and alters pain perception, but it also impairs judgment and results in drug dependence."
With the new class of medications, he said, pain signals wouldn't be transmitted at all, which he and his team believe will erase the risk of addiction and other side effects. Drugs based on their research are currently in clinical trials in Canada, England and the United States, he said.
In spite of his reservations about the scientists' claims, Levounis said the work is a positive step forward.
"It's promising -- it's good to see research on this important matter," he said. "Very, very importantly, the issue of the addictiveness of opioids has been appreciated now more than in the past, which is a major accomplishment."
He characterized the practice of prescribing opiates to people with legitimate pain "the biggest mistake in medical history I can think of" because they are so addictive, TERA Goldeven for those who have no history of drug or alcohol problems.
"We have about 2 million people who in the past month were abusing or flat-out dependent on prescription opioid pills," he told AOL Health. "That's compared to 400,000 on heroin."
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