Synthesizing a possible alternative to addictive painkillers

By Yun Xie |

Opioids like morphine, codeine, and opium are effective painkillers, but they also have adverse effects, including addiction, nausea, and constipation. Thus, scientists are actively looking for alternative drugs that would mitigate pain with minimal side effects. Nature serves as a great resource, as there are a large variety of plants with medicinal properties.

In a recent issue of Nature Chemistry, chemists from the Scripps Institute in Florida report that a natural product called conolidine acts as a non-opioid analgesic. Conolidine is one of the many chemicals found in a flowering tropical plant (Tabernaemonta divaricata) that could have medical relevance. Traditional Ayurvedic (native to India), Chinese, and Thai medicines use the tropical plant for treating pain, fever, dysentery, and other diseases.

It is extremely difficult to isolate conolidine from plants, as it is a rare component—scientists have only been able to extract conolidine with about 0.00014 percent yield. In order to study conolidine’s medicinal properties, researchers would need a more efficient way to obtain the pure compound.

Lead author Michael Tarselli led a Scripps team that successfully synthesized conolidine for the first time. They managed to obtain conolidine from a commercially available starting material in nine steps (short for natural product synthesis) with an 18 percent overall yield, which is efficient enough for research purposes.

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http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/05/a-possible-alternative-to-addictive-painkillers.ars

I have to take benedryl and marinol to keep them down. I have had 5 major surgeries and no way could I have dealt with 4 cancer and 1 bypass w/o something for pain.