Why You’ve Never Heard of the Vaccine for Heroin Addiction (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by Theresa , Friday, January 09, 2015, 06:58

Every week, the chemist Kim Janda at the Scripps Research Institute gets at least one email—from an heroin addict or a person who loves a heroin addict—that goes something like this:

"I know you have no idea who I am, but I, as any true mother, want to save my son's life—as does he! The problem is he can't beat the craving and we are out of money. I will do whatever it takes to help him...Is there any way that he can become a part of a study for this vaccine?"

Janda responds to each email with the bad news that he has no current trials to enroll them, despite the fact that he has created what is likely the most promising vaccine against heroin addiction ever developed. Unfortunately, as is the case with lots of promising addiction research, no one wants to bankroll it.

"No pharmaceutical company is going to fund trials for heroin, no way," says Janda, who's been working on addiction vaccines for decades. "For meth? No way. Forget about it." Janda has also worked on a meth vaccine. He has one for cocaine and one for a date rape drug too, but the heroin vaccine is the one he's most confident about because it was proven to work a in clinical trials on rats. "The heroin one has been our best success in over 25 years of working—it's the best data we’ve seen," says Janda.

In 2013, preclinical trials of the drug on heroin-addicted rats showed those vaccinated didn't relapse into addiction and were not hooked by high amounts of heroin in their system. "It's really dramatic," says Dr. George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) who was involved in the heroin vaccine research. "You can inject a rat with 10 times the dose of heroin that a normal rat [could handle] and they just look at you like nothing happened. It's extraordinary."

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