Opioids are drugs that affect the brain to raise pleasant feelings.
Opioid medications are given to treat pain and other health problems.
Dependence is one of the common side effects of used opioid medication.
Addiction sometimes happens through misuse of opioids.
Buprenorphine (BPR) was known as potentially valuable for the safe
and effective treatment of opioid addiction, nearly 35 years ago [1].
BPR (Scheme 1) is a semi-synthetic derivative of thebaine, one of the
most chemically reactive morphine alkaloids. Compared with morphine,
the usefulness of BPR is 20–40 times higher than that of morphine
[2] because morphine is a full μ-opioid agonist but BPR is a
partial μ-opioid agonist that indicates high affinity and slowdissociation
from the μ-opioid receptor