Recruiting Seeking US adults with experience using SR-17018 for anonymous Johns Hopkins online survey study

Tronica

Tronica

Executive Director
Staff member
Joined
Mar 12, 2002
Messages
5,651
Location
Castlemaine, Australia
I am Austin Zamarripa, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and we are conducting a research study seeking adult volunteers in the US to complete an online survey about SR-17018 use. We want to learn more about experiences individuals feel when using SR-17018.

This study has received ethical clearance from the Johns Hopkins Medicine IRB with the assigned protocol number: IRB00557700. Study recruitment is currently open beginning June 2026. The study is expected to remain open until approximately October 2026, or until recruitment is complete.

If you have experiences trying and using SR-17018, whether for recreational or medicinal purposes (e.g., self-treatment for opioid use disorder), you may be eligible to complete the survey.

The survey is anonymous and does not collect personal health information about you. Completion times will vary based on substance use experiences, but we estimate the survey to take approximately 15-25 minutes to complete.

There is no treatment as part of this study and survey completion is not compensated. There are no costs to complete the survey. If you are interested in volunteering to complete this online survey, please see the link below. Using the below link will provide you with additional information and access to the survey.

https://jhmi.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6WGVPz8jn4SDu0S

Thank you!
The Principal Investigator for this study is C. Austin Zamarripa, Ph.D.
Institution: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Contact Email: [email protected]
JHU Study Protocol: IRB00557700
 
We'd also like to thank Austin and his team for supporting Bluelight through a banner ad.

We'd like to encourage anyone here who has experience with this novel substance to complete this survey.

Please also include any questions or concerns in this thread, thanks.
 
Last edited:
How do you know they used SR 17018 ? They buy it from “dealers in internet”. Do you send your tested product to those users ? Otherwise how can you be sure it is exactly sr 17018 ?
 
Ban.Zai said:
How do you know they used SR 17018 ? They buy it from “dealers in internet”. Do you send your tested product to those users ? Otherwise how can you be sure it is exactly sr 17018 ?
Click to expand...
you dont, this is a survey study
 
Those excessive chloride functional groups are concerning. I have researched drugs of any known class, from (obscure) opioid derivatives to stimulants and one constant that is always present with halogenated compounds is their incredible toxicity, which increases exponentially the more of those functional groups are halogens. I have been often tempted to design chloro/bromo/iodo opioid derivatives since halogenated opioids often show very interesting traits that non-halogenated ones do not have and could therefore be the "holy grail" to many of the problems associated with chronic opioid use, but what's the point of ending up with an agonist that potentially solves tolerance, when that molecule's metabolic product(s) are slowly eating up your brain/liver/bones/etc. from the inside out?
Iodine-based compounds tend to be the safest, since they "only" ever mess with your thyroid gland, but is a life without tolerance still worth having to deal with insomnia, mood swings, obesity, tachycardia, etc.?

I have observed the following halogen-specific toxicities from reading papers on compounds that contain such functional groups:
​
1. Fluoride-based compounds are cardio- and osteotoxic. They are so by virtue of fluoride stimulating the body's cells to release calcium, which in turn prevents the body from employing that calcium to create hydroxyapatite which is literally the building material of our bones and teeth. This leads to a gradual decline in the subject's bone and dental health. Since calcium is also the critical component that helps modulate the heartbeat by virtue of it being an electric messenger of sorts, a lack thereof can be fatal. An awful lot of pharmaceuticals with fluoro groups are responsible for heart diseases. Fluoride also tends to lower IQ levels.​
​
2. Chloride-based compounds are notoriously neurotoxic. A famous drug that was touted as "safe and effective" for decades was (hydroxy)chloroquine, which caused everything from direct nerve damage (exponentially increasing rate of blindness, beginning from <1% for the first five years of taking HCQ and nearly 20% after 20 years of chronic use!!! Source: https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/related/hydroxychloroquine-eye-side-effects/) to schizophrenia, neuropathic pain, and other nerve related issues.​
​
3. Bromide-based compounds are mainly cytotoxic, but also affect your brain, especially the parts that are responsible for attention and memory (in other words, people with AD(H)D shouldn't touch this stuff). Brominated compounds are excellent fire retardants, degreasers and dry cleaners, but they really shouldn't be used in pharmaceuticals. The dangers of brominated agonists are largely identical to the symptoms of a condition known as bromism: skin rashes, chronic fatigue, poor focus or short attention span, impaired memory, speech problems, etc. Also, here is an interesting observation: this study here, in which a patient developed Bromism by excessive cola consumption, states that he had significantly elevated levels of serum chloride (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9140329/). It turns out that this is so because our body is unable to differentiate between bromide and chloride atoms, which leads to a falsely high chloride reading, masking the real culprit, because our kidneys strongly prefer bromide over chloride. When filtering our blood, they actively reabsorb bromide and throw out the extra chloride (source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/bromine-derivative). This would explain why many of the symptoms of bromide poisoning mimic those of chloride poisoning (neurotoxicity)!!!​
​
4. Iodide-based compounds I have already explained above.​


I'm not saying that people shouldn't take what works for them and their troubles, but be aware that it WILL come with a price. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it most certainly will when dealing with halogenated compounds.

Take care,
Opiophiliclab
 
Last edited:
Opiophiliclab said:
Those excessive chloride functional groups are concerning. I have researched drugs of any known class, from (obscure) opioid derivatives to stimulants and one constant that is always present with halogenated compounds is their incredible toxicity, which increases exponentially the more of those functional groups are halogens. I have been often tempted to design chloro/bromo/iodo opioid derivatives since halogenated opioids often show very interesting traits that non-halogenated ones do not have and could therefore be the "holy grail" to many of the problems associated with chronic opioid use, but what's the point of ending up with an agonist that potentially solves tolerance, when that molecule's metabolic product(s) are slowly eating up your brain/liver/bones/etc. from the inside out?
Iodine-based compounds tend to be the safest, since they "only" ever mess with your thyroid gland, but is a life without tolerance still worth having to deal with insomnia, mood swings, obesity, tachycardia, etc.?

I have observed the following halogen-specific toxicities from reading papers on compounds that contain such functional groups:
​
1. Fluoride-based compounds are cardio- and osteotoxic. They are so by virtue of fluoride stimulating the body's cells to release calcium, which in turn prevents the body from employing that calcium to create hydroxyapatite which is literally the building material of our bones and teeth. This leads to a gradual decline in the subject's bone and dental health. Since calcium is also the critical component that helps modulate the heartbeat by virtue of it being an electric messenger of sorts, a lack thereof can be fatal. An awful lot of pharmaceuticals with fluoro groups are responsible for heart diseases. Fluoride also tends to lower IQ levels.​
​
2. Chloride-based compounds are notoriously neurotoxic. A famous drug that was touted as "safe and effective" for decades was (hydroxy)chloroquine, which caused everything from direct nerve damage (exponentially increasing rate of blindness, beginning from <1% for the first five years of taking HCQ and nearly 20% after 20 years of chronic use!!! Source: https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/related/hydroxychloroquine-eye-side-effects/) to schizophrenia, neuropathic pain, and other nerve related issues.​
​
3. Bromide-based compounds are mainly cytotoxic, but also affect your brain, especially the parts that are responsible for attention and memory (in other words, people with AD(H)D shouldn't touch this stuff). Brominated compounds are excellent fire retardants, degreasers and dry cleaners, but they really shouldn't be used in pharmaceuticals. The dangers of brominated agonists are largely identical to the symptoms of a condition known as bromism: skin rashes, chronic fatigue, poor focus or short attention span, impaired memory, speech problems, etc. Also, here is an interesting observation: this study here, in which a patient developed Bromism by excessive cola consumption, states that he had significantly elevated levels of serum chloride (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9140329/). It turns out that this is so because our body is unable to differentiate between bromide and chloride atoms, which leads to a falsely high chloride reading, masking the real culprit, because our kidneys strongly prefer bromide over chloride. When filtering our blood, they actively reabsorb bromide and throw out the extra chloride (source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/bromine-derivative). This would explain why many of the symptoms of bromide poisoning mimic those of chloride poisoning (neurotoxicity)!!!​
​
4. Iodide-based compounds I have already explained above.​


I'm not saying that people shouldn't take what works for them and their troubles, but be aware that it WILL come with a price. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it most certainly will when dealing with halogenated compounds.

Take care,
Opiophiliclab
Click to expand...

You aren't a medicinal chemist I assume.

You are confusing IONS with co-valently bonded moieties and cherry-picking examples of organic compounds. You cannot just make vast generalizations about an element being present and that element being automatically toxic.

You conveniently avoided the nitrile moiety (or cyanide as I'm sure you would see it) but yet here we are with medicines containing a nitrile moiety and nobody dying from cyanaide poisioning...

Sertraline has that same ortho dichloro moiety as AR-17018 and yet we don't appear to be seeing the apocalypse you appear to be predicting. I think the vast majority of BLer can just look at the structures of thousands of medications and see that all of those 'dangerous' elements are within those strucures yet only a handful were later found to be toxic. All of the halogens find uses as do the pseudohalogens and yet oddly, the one moiety that medicinal chemists are wary of is the simple aryl nitro because it's labile and the metabolites can be toxic. Yet it only contains nitrogen and oxygen so by your methadology should be safe.

You also totally missed a far more fundamental question. How do the users KNOW what they are taking really is SR-17018? Surely overthinking a potential toxicity which didn't show up in the human trials of SR-17018 (and yes, I've posted ALL of those trials a dozen times) matters not one jot if what a person is consuming isn't even what YOU think it is.
 
Last edited:
4DQSAR said:
You aren't a medicinal chemist I assume.

You are confusing IONS with co-valently bonded moieties and cherry-picking examples of organic compounds. You cannot just make vast generalizations about an element being present and that element being automatically toxic.

You conveniently avoided the nitrile moiety (or cyanide as I'm sure you would see it) but yet here we are with medicines containing a nitrile moiety and nobody dying from cyanaide poisioning...

You also totally missed a far more fundamental question. How do the users KNOW what they are taking really is SR-17018? Surely overthinking a potential toxictity which didn't show up in the human trials of SR-17018 (and yes, I've posted ALL of those trials a dozen times) matters not one jot if what a person is consuming isn't even what YOU think it is.
Click to expand...
Hi 4DQSAR,

We are not aware of any approved or published clinical trials in which SR-17018 was administered to human participants. Could you please repost the studies you are referring to, or provide links so they can be reviewed?

Thanks,
Austin
 
https://sci-hub.st/10.3390/molecules26154509
Sci-Hub: are you are robot?
Sci-Net: Effects of a highly G Protein-Biased Mu Opioid Receptor Agonist, SR-17018, in Non-human Primates
Sci-Net: G Protein-Biased Mu Opioid Receptor Agonist SR-17018 Has Low In Vivo Efficacy In Non-Human Primates
Sci-Hub: are you are robot?
https://www.researchgate.net/public...ias_Behavioral_and_Molecular_Modeling_Studies

I cannot ethically support primate studies but I have to admit that they are generally a lot more useful in divining the subjective action of a medication than rodent models. So we have the human study, several primate studies and a mix of rodent models and in vitro models.

If I missed one, please let me know so I can add it - but this isn't an unknown compound. It was initially developed as a replacement for oxycodone but simply turned out to have variable pharmokintetics and wasn't a particularly good analgesic.

I also costed the production of SR-17018 based on US Patent Application US20190055214A1 and pointed out that on a per-dose basis, the price was a couple of orders higher than brorphine (chosen because of structural similarity) so questioned the business model used. If you go back and look I have carefully laid out every cost with prices of reagents, solvent, co-reactants, catalysts and so on as well as sunk costs such as the time, space and laboratory assets that would have to be used to produce the product at scale. The patent only deals in the single gram scale so I also pointed out that things like a reaction being slightly exothermic likely wouldn't even be noticed at the 1g scale but would increase the difficulty at scale.

I did my best but scaling is what chemical engineers do - so outside my domain of knowledge. But I asked people if I was wrong about anything and if so could they point out my mistakes.
 
Last edited:
4DQSAR said:
https://sci-hub.st/10.3390/molecules26154509
Sci-Hub: are you are robot?
Sci-Net: Effects of a highly G Protein-Biased Mu Opioid Receptor Agonist, SR-17018, in Non-human Primates
Sci-Net: G Protein-Biased Mu Opioid Receptor Agonist SR-17018 Has Low In Vivo Efficacy In Non-Human Primates
Sci-Hub: are you are robot?
https://www.researchgate.net/public...ias_Behavioral_and_Molecular_Modeling_Studies
Click to expand...
Thanks for sharing these studies. They involve rodents and nonhuman primates rather than human participants. We were specifically trying to determine whether any new evidence from human participants has been published.

We agree with your broader point that individuals using products marketed as SR-17018 cannot be certain of what they are consuming, even when a company provides a Certificate of Analysis. In our work on cannabis products, often times we see a huge mismatch between company-reported and researcher-reported CoAs. We hope to investigate SR17018 products directly in future work, including independent analytical testing of products marketed as SR-17018.
 
My mistake.

For some reason I thought there had been a human trial in China.

The other thing I pointed out is that oliceridine (Olinvyk™) and TRV734 (Aisute™) are biased opiate agonists already in human clinical use so it may be of benefit to read case studies as they arrive. The former is used in the US and I keep noticing that the protocol for it's use keeps being updated. It does seem that in that case there is something that means it has to be carefully titrated.

Why I do not know. It wouldn't be the first medication where genetic variability means that the appropriate dose is harder to find.

It just seems that reading about those two might at least offer some clues if you see similar patterns in people using SR-17018.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top