The Wellcome Foundation lecture, 1982. Opioid peptides and their receptors.

The remarkable feature of the opioid system is the complexity of its ligands and their interactions with the mu-, delta- and kappa-binding sites. The three endogenous opioid precursors give rise to more than ten opioid fragments. The fragments of pro-opiocortin and pro-enkephalin have affinities mainly to the mu- and delta-binding sites and those of pro-dynorphin have a preference for the kappa-binding site. It is important to realize that some of the larger fragments may have pharmacological actions that are of a non-opioid character. As the endogenous opioid peptides bind to more than one of the types of binding sites, it was necessary to obtain synthetic compounds that bind almost exclusively at one site. There are now agonists for which this aim has been achieved but we still require antagonists that are exclusively selective for only one opioid site. The results obtained with opioid peptides or non-peptides having such qualities would be the physiological basis for a correlation of the binding at mu-, delta- and kappa-receptors with their pharmacological effects. Furthermore, since almost all endogenous opioid ligands are degraded by peptidases, it is necessary to synthesize non-toxic inhibitors of those peptidases that play a role in opioid transmission. Related to this problem is the need to develop methods for the study of the release of various endogenous opioid peptides under physiological conditions.