According to the CDC, 91 people die from opioid overdoses every day in the U.S. Here in Massachusetts, the state has an opioid-related death rate that is more than twice the national average.

“Opioid abuse is a growing problem in healthcare,” says Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, a senior associate in critical care medicine at Boston Children’s and professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School.

Now, Kohane and other scientists who are developing triggerable drug delivery systems at Boston Children’s Hospital have found a new way to non-invasively relieve pain without opioids. Their novel system uses ultrasound to trigger the release of nerve-blocking agents — injected into specific sites of the body ahead of time — when and where pain relief is needed most. A paper describing the findings was published online today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. …