Scientist Claims to Have Finally Invented a Hangover Cure That Works

Drunk mice are waking up without a hangover, and if everything goes to plan, you could be too. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California believe they’ve developed a hangover cure that actually works.

All we had to do to find the cure was to look inside ourselves. In an article in The Conversation, UCLA researcher Yunfeng Lu writes that the “antidote” comes in the form of “capsules filled with natural enzymes usually found in liver cells to help the body process the alcohol faster.” Lu, together with his USC partner Cheng Ji and graduate student Duo Xu, are basically taking what our body does naturally and making it do it better. Early tests of injecting mice with the serum have been promising, Lu writes. The experiments found that blood alcohol level in the treated mice dropped 45 percent in four hours compared to mice that didn’t get the treatment, and the juiced-up mice also woke up faster.

“Inspired by the body’s approach for breaking down alcohol, we chose three natural enzymes that convert alcohol into harmless molecules that are then excreted,” Lu writes. “That might sound simple, because these enzymes were not new, but the tricky part was to figure out a safe, effective way to deliver them to the liver.”

Lu and his crew aren’t the first researchers to claim they’ve found the golden pill to cure hangovers. Princeton students came up with Thrive in 2016 and Yale seniors introduced SunUp in 2017. There are 157 results for the search “hangover pill” on Amazon. Think of Lu’s pills like those enzyme supplements for people with indigestion, but for drinking.

Don’t bother scheduling a doctor’s appointment for a ‘scrip just yet. The invention doesn’t have a name and still needs to be tested on humans (Lu writes tests could start “in as early as one year”). Until then, we’ll all be stuck with the hangover cures that cultures around the world have been perfecting since early humans first partied too hard.