Analgesia after peripheral administration of enkephalin and endorphin analogues.

Several analogues of Met-enkephalin and beta-endorphin were tested for their analgesic properties after systemic injection. The latencies of mice to flick their tails away from a source of heat revealed that analogues of the opiate peptides can cause analgesia when injected by this route. In particular, compounds specifically designed to be more lipophilic or to possess additional binding sites were shown to be potent analgesic after peripheral administration.