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Can someone summarize by what mechanism the immune system can somehow fight meth addiction? I can't see how those two biological worlds interact.
by BurningFrog 4y ago
Can someone summarize by what mechanism the immune system can somehow fight meth addiction?
I can't see how those two biological worlds interact.
- Herodotus38 4y agoIt probably works by the same mechanism that people have used to try and develop cocaine vaccines over the decades. Basically you introduce an antigen to the body so that large amounts of antibodies are created which bind to cocaine and prevent it from being uptaken into the neuroreceptors where it acts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TA-CD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TA-CD https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7703925/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7703925/
- StrictDabbler 4y agoThe vaccine is intended to make you allergic to meth. This is difficult because meth is small and weakly antigenic. The vaccine candidates attach extra groups to the meth to make it seem more like a bioactive compound that the immune system should destroy. (I am describing conjugate vaccines badly) The studies reviewed here suggest that vaccination can produce meth antibodies and reduce blood concentration but it's not clear to me that this would work on a human addict. It seems like the addict would just take in more meth, unless the antibody reaction is supposed to be an unpleasant disincentive. It seems that previous studies on cocaine failed to actually affect behavior so this may well be more like pure research than a practical project.