Designing safer opioids

Opioid medications offer people relief from debilitating pain, but these drugs come with dangers: the risk for addiction, miserable withdrawal symptoms and the potential for fatal overdose. Researchers have now identified a strategy to design safer opioids. They showed that an experimental opioid, which binds to an unconventional spot in the receptor, suppresses pain in animal models with fewer side effects -- most notably those linked to fatal overdoses.