SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Dr. Lowe, from In The Pipeline, writes about the development of a vaccine for heroin:
At first thought, that might seem like a weird idea. Drugs of abuse, such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine et al. are small molecules, and as such are too small to set off immune responses on their own. But a strategy could be to attach them to some larger protein that can raise antibodies – if those antibodies recognize the drug-labeled part of the protein conjugate, they may well retain activity against the drug molecule in its free state.
[...] It's been a long road. The first morphine immunoconjugate was described in 1970, and a morphine vaccine was tested in rabbits in 1975. But very little progress in the field occurred over the next twenty years or so, partly because methadone treatment for heroin addiction had become widely used. It's interesting to note, though, that vaccine development work against amphetamine seems to have followed a roughly similar path
[...] It would seem that we really are getting close to human clinical trials for some of these, which will be quite interesting. A drug-abuse vaccine is not going to be magic, though. Because of the specificity of the immune response, someone who's been vaccinated against heroin would almost certainly still respond to morphine, and most definitely would to compounds like fentanyl or oxycodone [...] But vaccines could, at the same time, provide the extra help needed for people to finally break free of a particular drug, and addicts who are really trying to quit need all the help that they can get.
I'd say that last part is the key. One of the big issues in drug addiction is (in the end) a philosophical argument about free will (which would explain why it never gets resolved!) Is drug addiction a disease, a choice, a behavior, a biochemical problem. . .the arguments go on forever, complicated by the way that different people attach different meanings to those terms.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/06/26/a-heroin-vaccine
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.7b03334
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 28 2017, @06:02PM
Yes, according to the summary:
This is just speculation, but maybe a "vaccine" could be made for an entire class of drugs, such as opioids. In which case substituting one molecule for a very similar one wouldn't cut it. Since the person addicted to heroin wants the effects of heroin, maybe they would not seek out something dissimilar, like barbiturates or ketamine or whatever.
Even more speculation: how about "molecular cages" that float around in your body, and release Narcan when opioids are present.
I didn't know this bit of info [wikipedia.org]:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]