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Researchers Are Training the Body to Attack Heroin Like It's the Flu

A promising new vaccine goes after heroin as soon as it hits the bloodstream, negating the effect of the hit, and (hopefully) keeping addicts from a full-on backslide.
via Wikimedia Commons

Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute have developed a vaccine to neutralize heroin’s effect in the bloodstream, before the drug reaches the brain. While still in the pre-clinical testing stage, the vaccine prevented even heavily-addicted rodents from getting any psychoactive experience from heroin, which the researchers hope will reduce the impact of relapsing for recovering, heroin-addicted humans. The vaccine trains the immune system to keep heroin out of the brain, by having antibodies fight the heroin molecules in the bloodstream. Joel Schlosburg, the lead author of the study, described how the vaccine works.

“We take a known immunogenic protein—something we know the immune system will respond to—and via chemical linker we attach heroin, or whatever molecule you want to train the immune system to recognize as a foreign invader, or as unwanted by the body," Schlosburg told me. "What ends up happening is that your body will end up creating antibodies against, not just protein, but the chemical that’s attached to it.” The vaccinated body, then, should send antibodies that bind the heroin as if it were the flu, and keep the drug out of the brain long enough for the kidneys and rest of the body to flush the drug out. As a result, the heroin causes no rush or reward, making relapsing that much less enticing.   George Koob, the study’s senior author, said that curbing the voluntary resumption of addictive behavior is very difficult, so the fact that this study has shown so much promise in rats makes its potential with human subjects very exciting.

“No one has ever addicted a rat to nicotine or cocaine and then shown they could stop them from re-addicting themselves,” Koob told the newspaper, U-T San Diego. The National Institutes of Health call drug addiction “a chronic, relapsing brain disease,” and as Schlosburg described, “the good and the bad of [the vaccine] is that it doesn’t act in the brain.” As a result, he and the team at Scripps see the vaccine as becoming part of a broader treatment, rather than a comprehensive treatment by itself. “We’re not treating, per say, the actual addiction,” Schlosburg said. “People will probably still have issues of craving and drug wanting.” Still, as a vaccine, the heroin vaccine has the potential to have a very low side-effect profile. Also, the vaccine is so specific—in this case to heroin—that it can be used along side something like methadone replacement therapy, without effecting the therapy’s impact. “You shouldn’t have to limit your options while using the vaccine,” said Schlosburg. “It’s something you can give in addition to other treatments.” The NIH states that over 200,000 people addicted to heroin pass through correctional facilities each year, and other sources indicate that recovering drug addicts relapse more than 50 percent of the time. The researchers will now look for funding to begin testing the vaccine in clinical trials. Koob told the U-T San Diego that he anticipated the trials would be relatively inexpensive, as these things go. “My guess is it would be less than the millions of dollars that need to be done for, say, an antidepressant,” he said.