In a promising discovery for students and party aninals all over the world, a team of researchers led by UCLA engineers has identified a method for speeding up the body’s reaction to alcohol consumption – practically elimining the hangover.
Researchers take their hangovers really seriously – in a paper published online Feb. 17 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Nanotechnology, Yunfeng Lu, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA, successfully placed two complementary enzymes in a tiny capsule to speed up the elimination of alcohol from the body. Basically, when you drink, your liver starts processing the alcohol. It works and works, and after a while, it’s just overwhelmed. This pill does pretty much the same thing – it essentially processes alcohol the way the liver does.
“With further research, this discovery could be used as a preventative measure or antidote for alcohol intoxication.”
The researchers used a mouse model to test how well the enzyme package worked as an antidote after alcohol was consumed. After they got the mice drunk and served them the enzymes, they found that blood alcohol levels dropped significantly – 15.8 percent lower than the control group after 45 minutes, 26.1 percent lower after 90 minutes and 34.7 percent lower after three hours.
The researchers believe this is just the beginning.
“Considering the vast library of enzymes that are currently or potentially available,” the authors write, “novel classes of enzyme nanocomplexes could be built for a broad range of applications.”