With fentanyl and heroin abuse fueling rising overdose fatalities, there’s good reason to pay attention to Dr. Kim Janda’s work. Janda, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute, has been working on developing a heroin vaccine—which he told The Fix last year showed promising results in animal experiments—and now a fentanyl vaccine.
A drug vaccine works by training the immune system to attack drug molecules before they can reach the brain and bind to receptors, by initiating an immune response where the body’s natural defenses attack the drug molecules. A vaccine for heroin or fentanyl would prevent the drug’s molecules from binding with opioid receptors in the brain, thus preventing the body from triggering a feeling of euphoria by numbing pain and boosting dopamine levels. The idea is the same for other drugs, like cocaine. While such vaccines would not be a panacea for America’s problem with opioid abuse—no vaccine works in 100% of patients—they could help addicts stay clean, preventing relapse and thus lead to long-term recovery.
“You have to trick the body, and it requires a fair amount of trickery,” said Phil Skolnick, director of the Division of Pharmacotherapies and Medical Consequences of Drug Abuse at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), to the Daily Beast in a recent feature that highlights this research. “The idea that [the researchers] can make an effective vaccine is very cool.”
The idea of drug vaccines has been around since the 1970s, says Janda, the scientist behind both the heroin vaccine and the subsequent fentanyl study. A major impediment to the development of drug vaccines is a lack of funding. As Skolnick explains, “The problem is that pharma companies have not been terribly interested in addiction research.” Even though the federal government has been allotting more funding toward addressing the opioid abuse crisis as of late, the researchers doubt drug vaccine research will see any of it.
Still, Janda’s team at Scripps is working with Molecular Express, a small biotech company, to bring the heroin vaccine to be tested in clinical trials. Human tests could start within the next two years, he told the Daily Beast. “The opioid epidemic is huge. It’s real and it’s not going away,” said Janda. “It’s a very hard addiction to break. I think whatever ways we can look at stopping it is important. And vaccines are one of the ways of looking outside the box.”
While a vaccine for drug abuse may sound strange to some, Janda said the concept is “simplistically stupid” in a 2011 New York Times feature on his work. Vaccines have already proved they could influence the immune system to mount antibody defenses against something as complex as a living virus, so why should there be reason to doubt that the same mechanism could neutralize an opioid or cocaine molecule?
Back in 2011, in the same Times feature, NIDA director Dr. Nora Volkow called Janda a “visionary” and said she was confident he would bring drug vaccines to the market. When exactly that will happen, is another story.