The Search for Vaccines against Street Drugs

August 17, 2017

(The Economist) – BETWEEN 2000 and 2015 half a million people in America alone died of drug overdoses—mostly of opioids, a class of addictive, generally synthetic painkillers related to morphine. On August 8th Tom Price, the secretary for health and human services in America, raised the possibility of a vaccine to prevent addiction—something he described it as “an incredibly exciting prospect”. Experts have cautioned that such treatments are nowhere near reality. But research is going on. A study published in this week’s Nature, for instance, describes the search for a vaccine against fenethylline—a drug particularly popular in parts of the Middle East.