© ISTOCK.COM/FARINOSWhen the late organic chemist John Daly was on the hunt for poisonous frogs, he employed an unadvisable method: “It involved touching the frog, then sampling it on the tongue. If you got a burning sensation, then you knew this was a frog you ought to collect,” he once told a National Institutes of Health (NIH) newsletter writer. Daly survived to gather frogs from South America, Madagascar, Australia, and Thailand, and he extracted more than 500 compounds from their skin (many of which the frogs in turn had harvested from their insect diets). One of these compounds, the toxin epibatidine, turned out to have an analgesic effect 200 times more potent than morphine in rodents, Daly and his colleagues reported in 1992 (J Am Chem Soc, 114:3475-78, 1992); and rather than working through opioid receptors, epibatidine bound to nicotinic receptors.
“To have a drug that works as well [as opioids] but is actually targeting a completely independent receptor system is really one of those holy grails of the drug industry,” says Daniel McGehee, who studies nicotinic receptors at the University of Chicago. But an epibatidine-related compound tested by Abbott Labs as an analgesic in the late 2000s caused uncontrollable vomiting, McGehee says. Although research on nicotinic receptors continues, he’s not aware of any epibatidine analogs currently in the drug development pipeline.
But frogs may yet hold clues to killing pain. At least one frog does deploy an opioid: the waxy monkey tree frog (Phyllomedusa sauvagii), whose skin is laced with the peptide dermorphin. Although the compound does not appear to be a toxin that wards ...
