14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers in California now claim to have succeeded in developing a pill that can force drunken mice into sobering up.
Needless to say, should this pill also prove efficient when administered to people, quite a lot of individuals would more or less patiently wait for the moment when pharmacies started selling it.
The researchers who rolled out this so-called booze pill explain that, in order to develop it, they merely had to combine two alcohol-digesting enzymes and then wrap the resulting concoction in a nanoscale shell.
Laboratory-based experiments have shown that, at least as far as mice are concerned, the pill is nothing if not efficient.
Thus, the drunken mice that had the enzymes-filled nanoscale capsule injected into their bodies sobered up significantly faster than the ones left to get back on their feet without any outside help.
More precisely, the mice that took the booze pill experienced their alcohol levels' dropping at considerably faster rates than those recorded in the case of mice belonging to the control group, MIT Technology Review explains.
Professor Yunfeng Lu, a researcher currently working with the University of California at Los Angeles and one of the scientists who helped this innovative pill, made a case of how, “It [taking the booze pill] would almost be like having millions of liver cell units inside your stomach and your intestine, helping you to digest alcohol.”
For the time being, further research on the matter at hand is needed.
However, both Professor Yunfeng Lu and his colleague, Professor Cheng Ji, are quite confident that it will not be long until they are able to conduct similar experiments involving human patients.
In the end, they hope that they will be able to roll out an alcohol antidote that can be administered orally.
The results of Professor Yunfeng Lu's and Professor Cheng Ji's work on developing this booze pill were published on February 17 in the scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology.