Opioids: Fighting Addiction with Chemistry

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These days it is difficult to escape the tragic news of yet another story referring to the growing opioid epidemic. In the United States, overdose deaths from opioids have nearly tripled in the last 15 years. In 2016 alone they have claimed more than 30,000 lives.

Learn what makes these compounds so addictive, the treatments and medications that are being used to help those who suffer, and profile the work that chemists are doing to make prescription pain killers safer and harder to abuse. Gather a group and interact with our expert panel of medical experts, and chemists to discover why this problem has become so widespread and how the power of chemistry can be used to fight the rising tide of addiction.

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What Your Group Will Learn

How the current opioid crisis and epidemic came to be
What are the neurobiological pathways in addiction and the role of dopamine
What are the current clinical pharmacotherapeutic approaches to opioid treatment
How opioid addiction differs from other types of addictions
The medicinal chemistry approaches that are being used to reduce the side effects and addictive potential of opioids by taking advantage of opioid receptor biology
Several novel alternative pathways and targets that are being investigated by medicinal chemists for alternative opioid treatment
Why translatability of preclinical models of pain and biomarkers are key hurdles in the development of better pain therapeutics

Additional Resources

How chemists are responding to the opioid epidemic
Bethany Halford, Emma Hiolski, and Tien M. Nguyen, C&EN
Abuse-deterrent opioids: Worth the effort and cost?
Tien M. Nguyen, C&EN
Powerful detection technology for powerful new street drugs
Emma Hiolski, C&EN
Looking beyond opioids for safer pain relief
Bethany Halford, C&EN
Vaccines against addictive drugs push forward despite past failures
Michael Torrice, C&EN
Investigating Drug Abuse: Brain Imaging
Short Video with Dr. Thomas Ross of the National Institute on Drug Abuse
Investigating Drug Abuse: Brain Neurons
Short Video with Dr. Carl Lupica of the National Institute on Drug Abuse

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