The Addiction Vaccine That Could Save ‘Quadrillions’ on Health Care Costs

 Addiction Vaccine  

Addiction is a growing epidemic worldwide, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Chemist Kim Janda is studying a potential vaccine to treat addiction to heroin and other drugs.

You’d think it would be a big deal if a scientist created a vaccine that could do away with addiction. So what if I told you that we already had one?

Kim Janda has a vaccine for heroin addiction. And meth. And cocaine, too. He gets calls and emails all the time from people who suffer from addiction or who know someone with an addiction and want more information about getting involved with clinical trials.

The problem? There haven’t been any clinical trials. And there won’t be any for the foreseeable future, either.

Says Janda: “No pharmaceutical company is going to fund trials for heroin, no way…Forget about it.”

"No pharmaceutical company is going to fund trials for heroin, no way…Forget about it."

Though he’s worked on vaccines for a variety of addictions, he says the one for heroin shows the most promise. In 2013, he carried out pre-clinical trials on rats who had, ahem, developed an addiction to heroin. After they were given the vaccine, the rats exhibited a “dramatic” reversal: After receiving the vaccine, these “addiction immune” rats could be injected with 10 times the dose of heroin that a “normal” rat could handle—without any ill effects whatsoever.

So what does this mean for human beings? Nothing yet, and that’s a big problem.

How Big Is Our Heroin Problem?

In America, our failed drug policies have actually contributed to a dramatic rise in heroin addiction and overdose. Painkiller abuse is frequently cited as a potential “gateway” to heroin use, which makes the 259 million painkiller prescriptions filed each year even more dubious. In 2014, the CDC estimated that 46 Americans die from painkiller overdoses every day.

So why would a painkiller abuser “graduate” to heroin? It’s pretty simple: heroin is cheaper. And you don’t need a prescription to get it.

Existing Solutions

Janda’s vaccines are not the first attempt to curb addiction with pharmaceuticals, but they’re almost certainly the most promising. The FDA has already approved a variety of drugs to treat withdrawal symptoms—a baby step, to be sure—but the drugs themselves pose a danger of dependency and withdrawal. You might recognize some of the names, including naltrexone, acamprosate, and buprenorphine.

The short version is that they’re far from perfect.

Adding to Janda’s setbacks were lackluster results from a nicotine vaccine study in 2011 and a cocaine vaccine study in 2014—two failures that, unfortunately, seem to have convinced pharmaceutical companies that research of this kind is a dead-end.

The tricky part of a vaccine like this is the fact that drugs wreak havoc with the brain’s reward systems—neurological impulses that the human body relies on for survival. Any attempt at a vaccine must seek to curb this effect without interfering with these important natural processes. Existing pharmaceutical solutions address addiction by blocking the relevant receptors in the brain. Janda’s vaccine works instead by preventing the drug from reaching the brain in the first place.

Money as the Great Equalizer

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The next step for Janda and his team of researchers is to secure investigational new-drug status from the FDA, which would allow them to conduct human trials. They’ve already received funding from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to the tune of $27.1 million dollars—but that’s not enough to cover the cost of human trials.

Which brings us to a pretty embarrassing point: We live in one of the richest and most powerful nations on earth. Janda and his team have stumbled onto something here that could change life in America in untold ways, and still they struggle with pedestrian concerns like money. Think about it: Without addiction, we’d make fewer arrests, our jails would be emptier, our cops would be less distracted with hunting and imprisoning drug addicts, our courts would be greatly unburdened, and we could turn our attention toward treatment instead of the jail-first-and-ask-questions-later approach we have now. In short: we could stop treating addicts like criminals and treat them instead like human beings with a disease.

Can we even put a price tag on that?

I can hear you already: Addiction is a choice—not a disease! Sure; it may start as a choice, as many things do, but neither you, nor I, nor anybody else, has a comprehensive understanding of what happens in the brain between that first “taste” of heroin and full-blown addiction. And that makes the management of America’s various addictions a job for scientists—not for cops.

The good news is that, in the world of pharmaceutical and health technology, sometimes all it takes is for one company, or even one person, to say or do something that captures the attention of the world. In the fight against latent tuberculosis infection, that company is Qiagen. In efforts to supply the world with potable drinking water, that person is Bill Gates.

At the end of the day, acknowledging a degree of fluidity in the way we respond to national health crises could help us save an incredible amount of money. George Koob, who has been at Janda’s side throughout these vaccine trials probably said it best:

“I am not sure Americans realize that if they treated alcoholism and drug addiction they would save quadrillions of dollars in health care costs.” So if we can’t answer to our hearts, maybe we can at least answer to our wallets.

By Daniel Faris

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Author Bio - Daniel Faris is a freelance journalist and a graduate of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University. When he’s not blogging about politics on Only Slightly Biased, you can find his alter ego discussing progressive music at New Music Friday. He currently lives in Philadelphia.