ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2000) — New Haven, Conn. -- A therapeutic cocaine vaccine designed to suppress the high addicts get from taking cocaine is safe and produced cocaine antibodies in humans, a Yale study finds.
Thomas Kosten, M.D., principal investigator on the phase 1 study, and his team administered the vaccine to 34 former cocaine abusers living in a residential treatment facility.
The vaccine, TA-CD, is designed to generate drug-specific antibodies, which bind to cocaine and prevent it from traveling to the brain from the bloodstream. This neutralizes its psychoactive effect.
"The vaccine is very safe and we did not observe any major side effects," said Kosten, professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. "TA-CD was effective in producing cocaine-specific antibodies, which lasted throughout the trial. More advanced trials are already underway. TA-CD offers the potential for a completely new and highly viable approach to a very serious problem for which there are no alternative therapies available.
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