A new report from the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, CA, describes a vaccine they have made against heroin. To make such a small molecule immunogenic, they coupled it to a foreign protein (making the heroin therefore into one more antigenic determinant on a large antigen) and added some adjuvant to boost responses. In animals, the vaccine was very effective in blocking the action of heroin. A neat twist: heroin is metabolized rapidly in the body to several related and active products, and the vaccine also degrades in the tissues, so that animals responded by making not only antibody to the initial, heroin, vaccine, but successively to the degradation products that remained attached to the protein and so were still immunogenic. They call this a "dynamic vaccine."
The next step would be to develop a version that could be used in people. Maybe it could be used after someone has completed a course of conventional detoxification therapy, to prevent a relapse (one assumes that they would simply not get a high from the drug, which would be neutralized by antibodies). On line, someone has already suggested giving the vaccine to every child at birth! I don't think that's going to happen. And I do worry about what someone with a strong addictive tendency might come up with to defeat the immunization...
