Can peptides offer alternatives to traditional opioid drugs?
Synthetic small-molecule opioids are by far the most commonly prescribed pain relievers in the United States (1). Although effective in their intended function, these compounds have serious drawbacks. In the late 20th and early 21st century, overprescription engendered a rise in prescription opioid abuse and the subsequent spread of far more potent and dangerous illegal derivatives, culminating in an opioid epidemic that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and continues to do so to this day (2).
This crisis has prompted extensive efforts to develop safer analgesics, such as synthetic opioid peptides (2). How do normal opioid drugs inhibit pain, and what makes them so dangerous? What are the advantages of short peptides with a different target? How does the pathway they initiate differ from that of their traditional counterparts on a molecular level?
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I really like the background you provide that gives context to your question. The map seems almost a little out of place because it comes right after you ask the questions. I think it could flow better if you broke the paragraph up and put the questions after the map.
Done!
Good introduction that leaves readers interested in reading on. Your three questions set the purpose of the website and hopefully get answered at the very end. You mention the opioid crisis and maybe you can have a separate page explaining more in detail about it, emphasizing the need for a new drug in the industry. Maybe this is where the map, and other statistics, like the most popular opioid drugs, can go.
Just move your page on the opioid crisis here since it seems you already mention it.
We actually decided with Diren and Katie that talking about the crisis briefly here and then more in depth in a separate section was best, but that definitely makes sense!
I believe that your page is really good in explaining the general topic and the questions are very clearly linked together and draw the reader into the rest of the website. However, I do agree that your image seems a bit out of place on this page. I believe that this graph fits better on you epidemic page as it relays to the number of deaths due to opioids. Maybe it would be more useful to have an image of short peptides and opioid molecules.
We decided to include both the existing figure and the structures you suggest; we wanted to visually represent the magnitude of the opioid crisis to make it clear how big the problem is, and then help explain our solution to that problem with the relevant chemical structures. Thanks!