FDS Insight Magazine Jun - Sep 2023

43 ‘Quite lethal’ combinations State and federal officials, including at the FDA, have worked for years to make the opioid reversal medication naloxone more readily available, and FDA advisers recently voted to make naloxone available without a prescription. But while naloxone is safe and highly effective on opioids, it may not fully address all the products contributing to the current state of the drug overdose crisis. Naloxone works very quickly to counteract an opioid overdose. But the effect doesn’t always last, particularly if there’s a lot of fentanyl in the body, Xinhua Li, Clear Scientific’s executive vice president of drug development, said. Too much opioid in the body will slow or stop breathing to potentially fatal levels. Meanwhile, stimulants such as cocaine and meth constrict blood vessels and increase the risk of an arrhythmia. ‘You can see why this combination could be actually quite lethal, and there naloxone may not be sufficient,’ Volkow said. Naloxone will improve oxygenation of the blood, ‘but it will not per se alleviate the vasoconstriction or the arrhythmogenic effects of methamphetamine and cocaine,’ Volkow said. Li and Shetty see their product as complementary to naloxone.