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After 50 Years of Failed Attempts, Is a Drug Vaccine Close?
Developing
In Short: After decades of research, a fentanyl vaccine is showing early success in human trials, generating anti-fentanyl antibodies.
In June, ARMR Sciences reported interim data from a phase 1/2 trial of Fentanyl Armour, a vaccine that generated anti-fentanyl antibodies in recipients at the lowest dose tested.
The vaccine worked in two-thirds of participants, but the agency required an intent-to-treat analysis before full approval.
Kim Janda, PhD, a professor of chemistry at Scripps Research, first published on a fentanyl vaccine in 2016, facing initial skepticism.
The vaccine works by training the immune system to intercept fentanyl before it reaches the brain, preventing euphoric effects and overdose.
What's still developing
- Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle are working on a multivalent vaccine targeting oxycodone, heroin, and fentanyl.
- With the influx of more potent forms of fentanyl and analogs like carfentanil in the illicit drug supply, naloxone is “actually being less and less effective,” said Seth Toback, MD, ARMR’s chief medical officer.
- The drug is cleared from the body without ever reaching opioid receptors, meaning someone with the fentanyl antibodies “won’t feel the euphoric effects [of fentanyl], and they certainly won’t overdose,” said Colin Haile, PhD, a research associate professor of psychology at the University of Houston, Houston, who led the preclinical work on the vaccine and co-founded ARMR Sciences.
- Janda noted that the vaccine does not treat addiction and should not be understood as a cure.
- In the early 1970s, a graduate student at Rockefeller University in New York City pitched an idea to his mentor, the physician who had given the world methadone maintenance : What if you could create a vaccine to train the immune system to intercept a drug before it reached the brain?
- Why would anyone choose a vaccine that took weeks to work over a pill that worked right now?
- He built a cocaine vaccine at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, first testing it in humans in 2000.
- Now, decades later, investigators have built on Kosten’s pioneering work to develop an experimental vaccine against fentanyl that is being tested for the first time in humans.
Sources
- Medscapelink