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part one/ The Heroin Vaccine That Could Save ‘Quadrillions’ On Healthcare Costs
By All That Is Interesting on July 17, 2015

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/heroin-vaccine

Kim Janda. Source: Robert Benson
You’d think it would be a big deal if a scientist created a vaccine that could do away with addiction. So what if I told you that we already had one?
Kim Janda has a vaccine for heroin addiction. And for meth. And for cocaine, too. Janda, an American chemist and the Ely R. Callaway, Jr. Chaired Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, gets calls and emails all the time from addicts, and people who know addicts, and who want more information about getting involved with clinical trials.
The problem? There haven
’t been any clinical trials. And there won’t be any for the foreseeable future, either.
Says Janda: “No pharmaceutical company is going to fund trials for heroin, no way … Forget about it.”

Though he’s worked on vaccines for a variety of addictions, he says the one for heroin shows the most promise. In 2013, he carried out pre-clinical trials on rats that had, ahem, developed an addiction to heroin. After they were given the vaccine, the rats exhibited a dramatic reversal: upon receiving the vaccine, these “addiction immune” rats could be injected with 10 times the dose of heroin that a “normal” rat could handle—without any ill effects whatsoever.
So what does this mean for human beings? Nothing yet, and that’s a big problem.

How Big Is Our Heroin Problem?
In America, our failed drug policies have actually contributed to a dramatic rise in heroin addiction and overdose. Painkiller abuse is frequently cited as a potential “gateway” to heroin use, which makes the 259 million painkiller prescriptions filed each year even more dubious. In 2014, the CDC estimated that 46 Americans die from painkiller overdoses every day.



[-chart]all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Heroin-Graph.jpg[/chart]

So why would a painkiller abuser “graduate” to heroin? It’s pretty simple: heroin is cheaper. And you don’t need a prescription to get it.

Existing Solutions
Janda’s vaccines are not the first attempt to curb addiction with pharmaceuticals, but they’re almost certainly the most promising. The FDA has already approved a variety of drugs to treat withdrawal symptoms—a baby step, to be sure—but the drugs themselves pose a danger of dependency and withdrawal. You might recognize some of the names, including naltrexone, acamprosate, and buprenorphine.
The short version is that they’re far from perfect.

Adding to Janda’s setbacks were lackluster results from a nicotine vaccine study in 2011 and a cocaine vaccine study in 2014—two failures that, unfortunately, seem to have convinced pharmaceutical companies that research of this kind is a dead-end.

The tricky part of a vaccine like this is the fact that drugs wreak havoc on the brain’s reward systems—neurological impulses that the human body relies on for survival. Any attempt at a vaccine must seek to curb the effect of what these drugs are doing without causing new neurological problems. Existing pharmaceutical solutions address addiction by blocking the relevant receptors in the brain. Janda’s vaccine works instead by preventing the drug from reaching the brain in the first place.

TIME Magazine phrases the mechanics of Janda’s vaccine as simply as possible: it essentially works like a sponge; it waits in the blood stream to intercept drug molecules, ensuring that their journey is a short one. The brain never even registers the drug’s presence. In short, it’s the most efficient solution to the addiction problem we’ve seen yet.