Amid opioid crisis, Butte, Montana’s Bryan Roth building a better painkiller

A "nobody, basically" during high school in Butte, decades later Bryan Roth is making headlines nationwide for a breakthrough that could be a major step toward painkillers that aren’t addictive.

Roth’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied how a protein in the brain interacts with opioids, which include oxycodone prescriptions, morphine, heroin and similar drugs. They then made a compound that interacts with only that protein.

Kristen Inbody, [email protected]

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/2018/02/05/butte-man-making-better-painkiller-amid-opioid-crisis/1075390001/