Cocaine abuse remains a major public health problem in the U.S., with an estimated 1.4 million Americans addicted to the drug. Currently, there are no FDA-approved drugs to treat cocaine dependence while there is no denying the fact that extensive research is being conducted to develop new and effective treatments for this hard drug abuse.
Here's some good news for those people who desperately want to break their addiction to cocaine because another experimental anti-addiction treatment - an "active" vaccine, is progressing ahead as planned.
The novel anti-cocaine vaccine, developed by teams led by Ronald Crystal from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, has been successfully tested in primates, and is all set to enter human clinical trials within a year.
The vaccine combines bits of the common cold virus with a particle that mimics the structure of cocaine.
According to Dr. Crystal, "When the vaccine is injected into an animal, its body "sees" the cold virus and mounts an immune response against both the virus and the cocaine impersonator that is hooked to it. The immune system learns to see cocaine as an intruder, and once immune cells are educated to regard cocaine as the enemy, it produces antibodies against cocaine the moment the drug enters the body, and prevents it from reaching the brain and producing a dopamine-induced high".
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