Scientists may have found the holy grail of pain management: a non-addictive opioid

Last week, researchers dropped a bombshell report on DFNZ, a developing new medicine derived from a class of drugs once considered too dangerous to even study. Their proposal sounded almost too good to be true: The drug might offer patients with chronic pain and injuries the benefits of an opioid without the threat of addiction or withdrawal.In a thorough study of the effects of DFNZ on rats, the researchers observed that the drug had an obvious “reward” effect on the subjects, but at a certain point, the rodents easily stopped going back for more.The findings are especially timely, as Americans battle two crises that often overlap: chronic pain and opioid addiction.A 2018 scientific paper published in the Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology found that more than 125 million Americans live with acute or chronic pain.Many of those patients have been prescribed an opiate to help manage it, a common practice that’s partially contributed to a nationwide opioid epidemic that killed 80,000 people in 2023.But doctors are buzzing over DFNZ’s potential to disrupt this tragic pattern.In fact, Dr.

Manassa Hany, MD, director of addiction psychiatry at Northwell Health’s Zucker Hillside and South Oaks hospitals, believes it could someday be the “holy grail of pain management” — offering a “much safer alternative” to drugs like fentanyl and oxycodone for post-surgical pain, cancer pain, severe chronic pain or other related conditions.“It challenges the decades-old dogma that any opioid with high efficacy at the mu-opioid receptor must inherently be dangerous and highly addictive,” he tells The Post, referencing a clinical term for opioid pain meds. DFNZ originates from nitazenes, a group of synthetic opioid compounds that’s considered one of the most powerful mu-opioid receptor agonists.But DFNZ’s properties — its high efficacy at treating pain, its limited brain entry and its “distinct cellular signaling profile” — “provide a comp...