A team of researchers, including four from UC Berkeley, developed a new painkiller compound that is less addictive and less likely to cause fatal overdoses from respiratory depression than morphine.
The molecule, called “carbamorphine,” was “made from scratch” through total synthesis, according to lead principal investigator and campus professor Richmond Sarpong.
Sarpong said the molecule differs from standard morphine by replacing the oxygen atom in the morphine molecule with a carbon atom, eliminating a hydrogen bond interaction that occurs between a receptor and morphine’s oxygen atom…