Last year, around 80,000 people died from an opioid overdose. While that’s fewer than were dying annually a few years ago, UT Health San Antonio professor of pharmacology and psychiatry Charles France, PhD, said it’s still far too many.
“There are medications out there, methadone, buprenorphine, naltrexone, drugs that can help these individuals,” France said, “But clearly more is needed.
As a researcher and as an educator, France has been studying this problem for years. Over the last few years, he’s turned his attention to drug development, and his lab has developed a new medication to add to that arsenal of medical weapons against the opioid crisis.
“Which has the name methocinnamox. It’s a big word,” France said. “We call it MCAM.”
MCAM works like naloxone, which can be used to save someone after they’ve overdosed on an opioid.
“One of the limitations of naloxone is that it lasts about an hour. So if somebody has taken a long-acting opioid, or if they’ve taken very large doses of opioids, the protection is fairly short-lived and requires multiple doses,” France explained. MCAM overcomes that limitation because the effects of MCAM last a lot longer — days or weeks instead of hours — which means it has an additional potential use that naloxone never did. Individuals who have suffered from opioid use disorder but are not currently using opioids can take it to protect themselves in the event of relapse.
“They’ll neither experience the euphoria nor could they kill themselves because this drug will protect them,” France said.
“So we envision this being a situation where the pill could be taken relatively infrequently and provide really prolonged protection from the overdose of opioids,” he added.
Some critics of naloxone claim it encourages opioid use by protecting people from the consequences of their actions. France explained that MCAM takes away the allure of opioid use for people with substance use disorders. “They could take opioids, but they wouldn’t get much experience from them, because it wouldn’t allow them to get the high,” he said.
“It doesn’t provide a high, it doesn’t deal with craving, but what it does is an excellent job of blocking the effects of opioids to prevent people from overdosing,” France stressed.
Now, it’s time to test MCAM in humans, which France says should begin before the end of the year.
“The thought of this going into people in the next six months and maybe saving lives in the next few years, you sort of think about that as a basic scientist, but to actually be able to almost taste it as a scientist is really exciting,” he said.
It’s clear that France is passionate about his work, and about the potential of MCAM. “I’m passionate about it because I care about mental health,” France said. “I care about people who are suffering from substance use disorders, and I think the drug we’re developing now can really make a difference in human health.”
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, about how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
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