The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla Tuesday announced successful preclinical testing of a vaccine that prevents fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that some drug dealers use as a mix-in or substitute for heroin, from reaching the brain.
The vaccine, which harnesses the body’s immune system, showed that it can curb addiction and prevent fatal overdoses, according to TSRI.
“We want to stay one step ahead of these clandestine laboratories making illegal opioids for black market demand,” said Kim Janda, a chemistry professor and member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at TSRI. “The importance of this new vaccine is that it can block the toxic effects of this drug, a first in the field.”
Fentanyl is a painkiller 50 to 500 times more potent than morphine, according to TSRI.
Over the years — to skirt U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration detection — illicit laboratories have tweaked the drug’s molecular structure, selling variants under names such as “China white” and acetyl fentanyl, the latter of which was responsible for a cluster of deaths recently in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.
Fentanyl was also at the center of one of San Diego’s most notorious murder cases — in which former county toxicologist Kristin Rossum was convicted of murder and use of a poison for injecting her husband, Gregory de Villers, with the substance in November 2000. Rossum is serving a life prison term with no chance of parole.
With so many variants on the market, users have no way of knowing the strength of the drugs they are using, which can lead to fatal overdoses. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 200 percent increase in overdose deaths involving opioids from 2000 to 2014, citing the availability of fentanyl and fentanyl variants as a major contributor.
While there are treatments — such as naloxone — for opioid overdose or methadone for addiction, Janda said many people still relapse.
“These treatments are working for some people, but there is clearly a gap that needs attention,” Janda said.
The researcher said the vaccine cocktail contains a molecule that mimics fentanyl’s core structure, which trains the immune system to produce antibodies to neutralize it.
When someone tries to get high from fentanyl or its variants, their antibodies bind to the drug and keep it from reaching the brain. In theory, blocking the ability to feel a high could stop drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior, according to the TSRI study results, which appear in today’s edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie.
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Addiction.
–City News Service
