Drug may give ‘immunity’ to nicotine

AMERICAN doctors are testing a radical new way to help smokers quit — an injection that “immunises” them against the nicotine rush that fuels their addiction.

That pleasurable buzz has seduced 75-year-old Mario Musachia into burning through nearly half a million cigarettes in half a century.

Now he is among 300 people testing an experimental vaccine that makes the immune system attack nicotine in much the same way it would fight a life-threatening germ.

The treatment keeps nicotine from reaching the brain, making smoking less pleasurable and, theoretically, easier to give up.

The small amount that still gets in helps to ease withdrawal, the main reason most quitters relapse.

If it works, the vaccine could become part of a new generation of smoking cessation treatments. They attack dependency in the brain instead of just replacing the nicotine from cigarettes in a less harmful way, like gum, lozenges, patches and nasal sprays.

One such drug, Pfizer’s Chantix, is due on the market soon. Another, Sanofi-Aventis’s Acomplia, recently won approval in Europe as a weight-loss drug.

If US regulators follow suit, some doctors say they also will use it to help smokers quit, especially those concerned about gaining weight.

“The typical patient is a 30-year-old woman who says ‘if I gain 5lbs, I’m going back’,” said Dr Taylor Hays, a smoking cessation expert at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Other novel drugs are in development, but NicVax, by Nabi Biopharmaceuticals, a Florida-based biotech company, is the most advanced among the vaccines.

After four smaller studies suggested it might be safe and effective, the new, larger study was started in Madison, Wisconsin; Minneapolis; Omaha, Nebraska; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Boston and New York City.

The Food and Drug Administration has granted the vaccine fast-track status, meaning it will get prompt review, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse just gave Nabi a second €3.2 million (€2.5m) grant to finance the study and NicVax’s development.

Mr Musachia, being tested at the Centre for Tobacco Research and Intervention on the fringes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, has tried many ways to quit but still smokes.

“I’m sick of it. I’m surprised I’ve lived this long,” he said.

He and other participants will get four or five shots, either four or six weeks apart, and will be studied for a year. Two-thirds will get the vaccine; the others, dummy shots. Neither they nor the doctors will know who got what until the study ends.

They will also have counselling and must set a quit date, usually around the second injection, because the first shot is just meant to “prime” the immune system. Subsequent doses make it produce antibodies, which latch on to nicotine in the bloodstream and keep it from crossing the blood-brain barrier and getting into the brain where it maintains the addiction.