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Vaccines for Treating Cocaine Use Disorders

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Biologics to Treat Substance Use Disorders

Abstract

The incidence and prevalence of cocaine use remain a significant public health issue. Annually, while it negatively impacts millions of individuals, contributes to thousands of deaths, and exerts a heavy burden on already stretched healthcare dollars and resources, to date, medications, or small-molecule approaches, to treat drug addictions have met with limited success. In contract, anti-addiction vaccines have demonstrated great potential for treating drug abuse using a distinctly different mechanism of eliciting an antibody response that blocks the pharmacological effects of drugs.

This chapter provides an overview of the development of cocaine immunotherapies and the progress made in this field. Building on the attempt to create cocaine catalytic antibodies in 1992, a significant breakthrough occurred in 1995 through a related approach being applied to humans: rather than making antibodies as catalysts for the metabolism of cocaine, researchers produced antibodies against the cocaine itself in human subjects.

This cocaine vaccine now has been through late phase II clinical trials. The mechanism of action for this vaccine is to induce antibodies to the cocaine, which act kinetically to slow brain entry as well as simple blocking by retaining the cocaine in the bloodstream. The review covers the clinical trials with the cocaine vaccine TA-CD. The clinical prospects for advances in this field over the next few years include developing a new cocaine vaccine that can produce much higher antibody levels by using a better adjuvant than alum alone.

Dr Kosten is the JH Waggoner Chair and Professor of Psychiatry, Pharmacology, Neuroscience, Immunology, and Pathology at Baylor College of Medicine.

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Acknowledgments

Research support was provided by NIH grant P50-DA18197. Additionally, in part, this material is the result of work supported with resources and the use of facilities at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, Houston, Texas. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the US government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Michael E DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Houston, TX, USA

    Coreen B. Domingo DrPH, Daryl Shorter MD & Thomas R. Kosten MD

  2. Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    Coreen B. Domingo DrPH, Daryl Shorter MD & Thomas R. Kosten MD

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  1. Coreen B. Domingo DrPH
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  2. Daryl Shorter MD
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Correspondence to Thomas R. Kosten MD .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA

    Ivan D. Montoya

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Domingo, C.B., Shorter, D., Kosten, T.R. (2016). Vaccines for Treating Cocaine Use Disorders. In: Montoya, I. (eds) Biologics to Treat Substance Use Disorders. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23150-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23150-1_3

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