A few months ago, we broke the news of a preprint with Elyssa Margolis’ lab at UCSF and Marisela Morales’ lab at NIDA. We’re now excited to say that this work has been published in Nature Communications.

In this work, we discovered that Mu-opioid agonists can drive analgesia by inhibiting the lateral habenula, and that this effect mainly relies on Mu-positive cells in the lateral preoptic area. What’s most important about this discovery, is that this analgesia requires the presence of ongoing pain. In other words, this circuit provides a mechanism only for pain relief, and does not support opioid reward. This provides an important way by which we might induce pain relief without worrying about many of the adverse effects of opioid treatments, including sedation, respiratory depression, or the risk for opioid abuse.