Why Snails Are A Lot Of Saliva / Snail Saliva As Effective as Morphine

To treat severe pain, sea snails may hold the answer. Scientists have developed a new drug was first isolated from the saliva of sea slugs which may be as effective as morphine.
Sea slug can not move fast, but what they lack in speed they more than make up for the chemicals. These animals have the ability to inject a mixture of toxins, called conotoxins fall prey to their targets using their needle-like teeth.
Conotoxins consists of peptides that can relieve severe neuropathic pain as effectively as morphine, but does not cause addiction. Efforts to change this conotoxins into drugs that can be used as a pain reliever has been challenging. As far as synthetic versions have been developed, but must be injected directly into the spinal cord using an implanted pump.
Now, a team of scientists in Australia have developed a conotoxin that can be taken orally. In tests with mice, the new drug proved effective as a pain killer gabapentin, which is the most popular drugs for treating neuropathic pain. Compared with gabapentin doses needed to treat the pain, however, conotoxin-based peptide (called Prialt) is less than 1 percent.

The research team, led by David J. Craik from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland, noting that the peptides are generally considered to be poor pain killers because they are unstable and mostly not available in oral form. One exception has immunosuppressant cyclosporine.
Could saliva-based drug next sea snail? Jon-Paul Bignham, a professor of molecular biosciences and bioengineering at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, showed that an oral drug that has the capability of the pain killer Prialt "would actually
revolutionize how we manage chronic pain and terminal "Move over, morphine ..


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