poledriver
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
- Messages
- 11,543
Needle vs needle: a vaccine for drug addiction?
I was recently a guest at a recording of the Wellcome Trust’s brilliant Level Up Human, a comedy/science podcast about improving humanity, hosted by Simon Watt. One of the first things guests have to do is talk about some interesting science news, focusing on human biology/medicine. To be honest, it was refreshing to read news that wasn’t about the EU referendum for a change.
One of the particularly intriguing things I found was that they’re apparently working on a vaccine for drug addiction (specifically, opiate addiction). Now there’s something to make a neuroscientist sit up and pay attention. A new weapon in the war on drugs? How can you even do that? How do you vaccinate against a type of behaviour? You don’t catch debilitating behaviour from a rusty nail, it doesn’t do the rounds of nursery classes like colds and chickenpox.
However, facetiousness aside, the logic behind this type of vaccine is impressive, and actually quite straightforward. The problem with drug addiction is that it does have a physical basis, where foreign elements introduced into the body disrupt the function of certain organs, in this case the brain. The brain is a very plastic organ which adapts to deal with whatever we throw at it (within reason). So, if you constantly dose it with potent narcotics, it will change to compensate for this. That’s largely why addiction is such a problem; it’s not just a matter of having the willpower to give up a bad habit, the brain itself has changed, to the point where it needs the drug to function normally.
It makes sense. Opiates activate the receptors that govern things like analgesia and pleasure, hence the intense “high” from heroin. But from a neurological perspective, this isn’t sustainable. So the brain adapts by increasing the amount of receptor activity required to trigger the same reaction. And so we get drug tolerance. So more drug is needed to achieve the same effects as before, and the brain adapts to this, and it increases ever upwards.
So imagine, then, that you suddenly stop taking your opiate of choice. You’ve now got a brain that has adapted to a constant level of powerful analgesics, and it suddenly doesn’t have that. What it ends up with, is an incredibly enhanced pain-perception system. And so going cold turkey can be agonising.
This isn’t even counting the other brain changes, such as how connections with the frontal cortex and other cognitive processes actually scramble conscious control and motivation, so people are constantly craving and seeking out the drug, despite copious evidence for the terrible damage it’s wreaking.
At the simplest level, all of this is the end result of a foreign substance entering the body and causing unpleasant consequences. So, what if you could train the immune system to recognise this substance in advance, and quickly neutralise it before it can have any harmful effects? That’s the mechanism by which standard vaccines against diseases work. And the aforementioned research is looking into whether the same approach could work on narcotics.
Cont -
https://www.theguardian.com/science...vs-needle-a-vaccine-for-drug-opiate-addiction
I was recently a guest at a recording of the Wellcome Trust’s brilliant Level Up Human, a comedy/science podcast about improving humanity, hosted by Simon Watt. One of the first things guests have to do is talk about some interesting science news, focusing on human biology/medicine. To be honest, it was refreshing to read news that wasn’t about the EU referendum for a change.
One of the particularly intriguing things I found was that they’re apparently working on a vaccine for drug addiction (specifically, opiate addiction). Now there’s something to make a neuroscientist sit up and pay attention. A new weapon in the war on drugs? How can you even do that? How do you vaccinate against a type of behaviour? You don’t catch debilitating behaviour from a rusty nail, it doesn’t do the rounds of nursery classes like colds and chickenpox.
However, facetiousness aside, the logic behind this type of vaccine is impressive, and actually quite straightforward. The problem with drug addiction is that it does have a physical basis, where foreign elements introduced into the body disrupt the function of certain organs, in this case the brain. The brain is a very plastic organ which adapts to deal with whatever we throw at it (within reason). So, if you constantly dose it with potent narcotics, it will change to compensate for this. That’s largely why addiction is such a problem; it’s not just a matter of having the willpower to give up a bad habit, the brain itself has changed, to the point where it needs the drug to function normally.
It makes sense. Opiates activate the receptors that govern things like analgesia and pleasure, hence the intense “high” from heroin. But from a neurological perspective, this isn’t sustainable. So the brain adapts by increasing the amount of receptor activity required to trigger the same reaction. And so we get drug tolerance. So more drug is needed to achieve the same effects as before, and the brain adapts to this, and it increases ever upwards.
So imagine, then, that you suddenly stop taking your opiate of choice. You’ve now got a brain that has adapted to a constant level of powerful analgesics, and it suddenly doesn’t have that. What it ends up with, is an incredibly enhanced pain-perception system. And so going cold turkey can be agonising.
This isn’t even counting the other brain changes, such as how connections with the frontal cortex and other cognitive processes actually scramble conscious control and motivation, so people are constantly craving and seeking out the drug, despite copious evidence for the terrible damage it’s wreaking.
At the simplest level, all of this is the end result of a foreign substance entering the body and causing unpleasant consequences. So, what if you could train the immune system to recognise this substance in advance, and quickly neutralise it before it can have any harmful effects? That’s the mechanism by which standard vaccines against diseases work. And the aforementioned research is looking into whether the same approach could work on narcotics.
Cont -
https://www.theguardian.com/science...vs-needle-a-vaccine-for-drug-opiate-addiction
