Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research recently published findings from a pre-clinical vaccine study aimed at providing protection from the physiological effects of heroin and fentanyl. The study found that the bivalent conjugate vaccine was efficacious in inducing dual immunogenic responses that ablate heroin and fentanyl effects in mice. Findings were published in Bioconjugate Chemistry.
WRAIR researchers had already shown the heroin vaccine to be efficacious in mice, but this study indicates that they can successfully combine the heroin and fentanyl vaccine candidates. The vaccines are made up of tetanus toxoid (TT)-hapten conjugates and adjuvanted with the Army Liposome Formulation (ALF43) and aluminum hydroxide. The ALF adjuvant is an Army adjuvant formulation developed by MHRP researchers in the Laboratory of Adjuvant and Antigen Research.
The vaccine is intended to be used as a therapy in conjunction with medication-assisted therapy.
Read the paper here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.bioconjchem.1c00179
This work was supported by National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) grant 5UG3DA048351-02