The medical world is alive today with the news that researchers have come up with a vaccine that will stop you smoking. But is it actually true? And how do you get one?
So is there a vaccine that will make me quit the smokes?
Well yes there is, but there’s a slight catch. Researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City have come up with a vaccine that basically sucks up all the nicotine in your system before it reaches the brain. They see it as the best way to kick the habit and it could even be better than using patches.
Speaking about the new findings, lead investigator Dr Ronald G Crystal said, “As far as we can see, the best way to treat chronic nicotine addiction from smoking is to have these Pacman-like antibodies on patrol, clearing the blood as needed before nicotine can have any biological effect.”
Sounds good so far, but what’s the catch?
The main catch here is that they’ve only tested the vaccine out on mice. However, the researchers found that a single dose of the vaccine protected the mice over the course of their lifetime. So it looks promising.
Well that’s great, for addicted mice… So what’s in this vaccine?
It’s all down to gene therapy. The researchers have actually created a new novel antibody that, as we said, eats up the nicotine before it reaches your brain. According to Medical News Today, new anti-nicotine vaccine is based on an “adeno-associated virus” (AAV), which has been engineered to be harmless.
So it’s actually a mutated virus?
Well, you could say that. But it’s not as if it’s going to kill you. The researchers have been able to make this virus do precisely what they want it to do. The virus carries two pieces of genetic information that both have their own functions. One gene causes anti-nicotine antibodies to be created by the virus, and the other gene looks for particular cells to insert the virus into, mainly the nucleus of the hepatocytes cells in the liver.
What will this mean for us humans?
Now that the test mice have done their job, the researchers will move on to bigger lab rats and then onto primates. It certainly looks promising, but we guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.
