Between 2000 and 2015 half a million people in America alone died of drug overdoses…On August 8th Tom Price, the secretary for health and human services…raised the possibility of a vaccine to prevent addiction…Experts have cautioned that such treatments are nowhere near reality. But research is going on. A study published in…Nature, for instance, describes the search for a vaccine against fenethylline—a drug particularly popular in parts of the Middle East.
…Cody Wenthur, Bin Zhou and Kim Janda at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, decided to try to develop vaccines against its components, and also against their metabolic breakdown products, as well as against the drug as a whole, in a process they call incremental vaccination.
Developing any vaccine means stimulating the immune system to recognise the thing to be vaccinated against. However, the immune system tends to recognise, and thus develop antibodies to, only large molecules like proteins. Most drugs are too small for it to notice…
When given a dose of the drug, mice that had previously been injected with this vaccine showed a marked reduction, compared with mice that had not been vaccinated, in the sort of incessant movement fenethylline induces.
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