Home-Brewed Synthetic Opioids Are Finally A Reality
Yeast growing in a petri dish Stephanie Galanie Pain-relieving opioids, like morphine or codeine, are important for medical purposes. The drugs have been around for millennia however even today they are still made from poppy flowers, making the production of the drugs dependent on poppy farming. Now, for the first time, researchers from Stanford University have been able to synthesize opioids from yeast cultures grown in the lab, according to a study published today in Science. This isn’t the first attempt to synthesize opioids. Researchers have been trying to do it for years in order to produce opioids more quickly, or even alter them to be less addictive. But the poppy plant’s chemical processes proved to be surprisingly difficult to replicate in the lab—in the most recent attempt, earlier this year, the researchers...