A vaccine against heroin addiction has been created

Kirill Stasevich, Compulenta 

To teach the immune system to respond not only to heroin, but also to its derivatives, scientists have developed a "dynamic vaccine" that undergoes the same transformations in the body as real heroin, and gradually teaches the immune system to recognize the products of heroin metabolism.

Drug addiction is a rather expensive thing for the country. According to statistics, the United States loses about $ 22 billion a year due to a decrease in the working capacity of the population, as well as due to the costs of medical care, social benefits and the fight against the criminal consequences of drug addiction. There is no need to remind you that the primacy among the most socially harmful substances belongs to heroin and its derivatives. Among the approaches proposed by scientists to combat heroin addiction, there is the idea of an antiheroin serum, which boils down to the fact that the body's immune system attacks a dangerous substance.

But the difficulty is that heroin is rapidly converted in the body into 6-acetylmorphine and morphine, which easily pass through the blood-brain barrier and reach opiate receptors in the brain. Therefore, immunity should simultaneously catch not one pest, but several at once.

Researchers from the Scripps Institute (USA) have found a way to train the immune system to recognize several heroin derivatives at once in one fell swoop. First, scientists synthesized a heroin-like hapten molecule. This is a "doll" molecule on which you can "train" immunity to a real enemy. But by itself, it is too small to be recognized by the immune system, so it needs a large macromolecule that will "represent" it. In this case, the researchers tied the hemocyanin of the marine mollusk fissurella to the hapten "doll", with the help of which the immune system was able to create specific antibodies.

The whole trick was that the substance imitating heroin slowly underwent the same changes in the body as the real heroin, that is, it gradually showed the immune system all morphine derivatives of heroin. And the attached protein did not interfere with this at all. The researchers called it a "dynamic heroin vaccine" and injected it into rats to test its effectiveness.

The transformation of heroin and a heroin-like vaccine "doll" in the body
(drawing by the authors of the study).

The results of the experiments are published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (Stowe et al., A Vaccine Strategy that Induces Protective Immunity against Heroin). In response to the introduction of the "dynamic vaccine", antibodies against the entire set of heroin derivatives began to be synthesized in the body of animals. Moreover, the vaccine was able to suppress the craving of rats for heroin: only three out of seven animals continued to press the lever to get the coveted drug. At the same time, a vaccine created only against morphine and not involving a change in the target substance did not reduce heroin cravings in animals.

The dynamic vaccine worked only with heroin derivatives and did not affect sensitivity to other substances that also interact with opioid receptors and are used in the rehabilitation of drug addicts (such as naloxone or methadone). Thus, the researchers conclude, the vaccine they created may well be used together with other types of anti-drug therapy.

Prepared based on the materials of the Scripps Institute: Scripps Research Scientists Create Vaccine Against Heroin High

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 22.07.2011