Researchers are turning to artificial intelligence to create and optimize potential new drugs to help people with opioid addiction. It is estimated that about three million Americans suffer from opioid use disorder, and every year more than 80,000 Americans die from overdoses. Opioid drugs, such
A compound generated by artificial intelligence-based tools predicted to bind to the kappa-opioid receptor. Credit: Image courtesy of Leslie Salas Estrada
It is estimated that about three million Americans suffer from opioid use disorder, and every year more than 80,000 Americans die from overdoses. Opioid drugs, such as heroin,, oxycodone, and morphine, activate opioid receptors. Activating mu-opioid receptors leads to pain relief and euphoria, but also physical dependence and decreased breathing. The latter is what leads to death in the case of a drug overdose.
Kappa-opioid receptors are known to mediate brain rewards. “If you’re addicted and you’re trying to quit, at some point you will get withdrawal symptoms, and those can be really hard to overcome,” Salas Estrada explained, “after a lot of opioid exposure, your brain gets rewired to need more drugs. Blocking the activity of the kappa opioid receptor has been shown in animal models to reduce this need to use drugs in the withdrawal period.
“Artificial intelligence has the advantage of being able to take huge amounts of information and learn to recognize patterns from it. So, we believe thatcan help us to leverage the information that can be derived from large chemical databases to design new drugs from scratch. And in that way, we can potentially reduce the time and costs associated with drug discovery,” she said.
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