Napp had recently developed a special coating system for pills that allowed the diffusion of a drug into the bloodstream of a patient to be carefully regulated over time. They called the system Continus, and they had already used it for an asthma drug. But what if you applied it to morphine? It would mean that a patient could swallow a pill and the morphine would slowly release into the body, in the same manner that it would on a drip. The new drug, which would become known as MS Contin, was released in the U.K. in 1980, and it was a breakthrough.
