Visualizing addiction: How new research could change the way we fight the opioid epidemic

New research from a Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience researcher could transform how we understand the way opioids affect the brain. Despite significant discussion surrounding the ongoing opioid crisis, current understanding of how opioids function in the brain is quite limited. This is primarily due to challenges in observing and measuring opioid effects in the brain in real-time.

However, a technological breakthrough, led by Dr. Lin Tian and her research team and collaborators, published in Nature Neuroscience, has overcome these limitations and is set to transform how scientists study opioid signaling in the brain.

What do we know about opioid signaling?

Pharmaceutical opioids, such as morphine and oxycodone, and illicit opioid drugs like heroin, affect the brain and body by binding to opioid receptors on the surface of cells in the nervous system. These receptors normally respond to naturally-produced chemicals that are released in your brain, called endogenous opioids, including endorphins, enkephalins, and dynorphins.

Released in response to pleasurable activities such as laughter, sex, and exercise and aversive activities like injury and trauma, these chemicals bind opioid receptors and reduce the ability of neurons to receive and transmit signals. These cellular effects ultimately lead to the cognitive and behavioral effects associated with opioids, including positive feelings, pain relief, and addiction.

Challenges in understanding opioid signaling

Numerous questions remain about how these behavioral effects are caused by opioids and whether it is possible to harness specific opioid properties such as pain relief without undesirable effects, such as addiction.

The opioid scientific literature is extensive and has confirmed that targeting the opioid system is of clinical interest—not only for pain management but also, more recently, for the treatment of mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression.

Development of therapeutics that can target these health challenges while preventing the tragedy of the current opioid epidemic requires further understanding of the diverse effects of opioids in the brain.

The diversity of opioid effects on the brain is driven by more than 20 different opioid chemicals produced in the brain and more than 500 different synthetic opioids. Most of these different opioids interact with all three types of opioid receptors with different strengths. Their varied effects depend on the concentration of opioid, the specific receptors present and the brain circuits involved.

"Efforts are underway to harness various therapeutic properties of opioids by targeting specific receptor actions and brain circuits to develop more effective and safer therapeutics. However, these efforts have been hampered by our inability to measure diverse opioid signaling in real-time in the brain effectively," said Dr. Tian.