From freezing showers to ingesting prickly pear to smoking joints, everyone has a home remedy for alcohol’s notorious afterglow: the hangover. Mongolian men swear by pickled sheep eyes, ancient Egyptians wore necklaces of Alexandrian laurel, and one 17th century English physician even sold a hangover “cure” made with human skulls and dried vipers.
Hangovers are a problem that even predates writing. But today with the aid of modern medicine we can treat diarrhea or headaches with over-the-counter drugs — so why not hangovers too?
“Each year, many people die because they drink too much,” Yunfeng Lu, a chemical engineering professor at UCLA, said in a phone call. “And currently, we have no antidote.”
But that could change. New research from Lu and his colleagues published in the journal Advanced Materials demonstrates a “hangover pill” that can mitigate some of the damaging effects of alcohol. The antidote mimics the work of hepatocytes, or liver cells, and helps speed up the body’s alcohol metabolism. It’s basically supercharging your liver’s ability to clear alcohol from the bloodstream, resulting in far lower levels of intoxication.
To test their treatment, scientists got mice drunk by inserting tubes into their mouths and pumping ethanol directly to the stomach. Within a few minutes, the rodents became intoxicated and fell asleep. Then, the researchers injected nanocapsules of blood cells loaded with enzymes that help break down alcohol into less harmful byproducts. Afterwards, the mice were sacrificed and their livers were examined with fluorescent imaging to measure toxicity.
