A vaccine aimed at helping cigarette smokers quit, is entering the next phase in testing.
A Virginia Tech professor who’s been working to develop the vaccine got a $2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to test the vaccine.
Citing an urgent need to develop effective treatments of nicotine addiction the NIH is funding trials by Virginia Tech Professor who’s been working to develop an anti smoking vaccine.
Mike Zhang, professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, explains, the vaccine is aimed at blocking the reward response that nicotine creates in the brain. “What we hope is that we will give it to the smoker or the people who are interested to be vaccinated and the body immune system will respond to that vaccine and generate antibodies which can bind to the nicotine molecule.”
The vaccine uses nanotechnology to bind the antibodies to the nicotine molecules preventing them from crossing the so called, blood/brain barrier. The NIH grant is for testing it on mice. If successful, the next step would be human trials.
Scientists hope there could be an anti-smoking vaccine available in perhaps five years.