Vaccination Against Cocaine

A new vaccine that is known have antibodies catch the molecules of cocaine before they reach the brain. It is shown that it does not catch all the cocaine, but it catches enough to reduce the devastating affects.
It is currently being tested on rats and monkeys before a decision is made to test on humans.

“When someone takes cocaine — whether snorted, smoked or injected — you don’t have much time,”

says study coauthor Ronald Crystal, a pulmonary physician at Weill Cornell Medical College in

 New York City.  “It takes about six second to pass from the lungs to the blood to the brain... We

need avid antibodies, at high levels.”

Mice were given three injections over six weeks. The control group received a placebo while the experimental group received 'cocainelike substance with noninfectious portions of an adenovirus that stimulate an immune response but don’t cause disease'. Four weeks after the 6 week injection period, all mice were given injection of cocaine.

However, the behavioral effects were even better. The cocaine-injected control rats (who received placebo) were running around (with the usual effects of cocaine) three times more than the experimental group.

The experimental group behaved similar to mice given no cocaine at all.

The drug has the potential to be tested in humans in 1-2 years. "Any prospective anticocaine vaccine needs a lot of testing, in part because it isn’t clear whether just taking more of the drug might overwhelm a vaccine’s effect, says Frank Orson, a physician and immunologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Also, the researchers in the new study used an additive called complete Freund’s adjuvant to boost the immune reponse in the mice. The adjuvant cannot be used in people because of side effects, he says."