{"id":47465,"date":"2011-10-03T08:09:10","date_gmt":"2011-10-03T12:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=47465"},"modified":"2011-10-04T10:03:14","modified_gmt":"2011-10-04T14:03:14","slug":"a-vaccine-for-nicotine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/10\/a-vaccine-for-nicotine\/","title":{"rendered":"A Vaccine for Nicotine?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Biologist<\/a>
Biologist Peter Burkhard with the molecule he developed to deliver nicotine to the immune system. (Daniel Buttrey\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Peter Burkhard first heard the idea of a nicotine vaccine eight years ago, he thought it was funny \u2013 how could a vaccine affect something that\u2019s not technically a disease?<\/p>\n

But the more he thought about the impact such a vaccine could have, the more it drew his attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at the consequences of cigarettes, it\u2019s mind-boggling,\u201d says the Swiss-born scientist. \u201cSeven million people are killed by the causes of nicotine addiction every year. That\u2019s like wiping out Switzerland, every year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burkhard, an associate professor of molecular and cell biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has just received a five-year, $2.5 million Avant-Garde Medications Development Award from the National Institutes Drug Abuse, a part of the National Institutes of Health, to develop and test a new vaccine for nicotine.<\/p>\n

The vaccine, which borrows from the principles of how viruses stimulate the immune system, could eliminate addiction in people dependent on cigarettes and other tobacco products.<\/p>\n

When you smoke, nicotine travels from your lungs to your blood, and finally to your brain, where it acts as a stimulant and produces a good feeling, or a \u201ckick,\u201d as Burkhard says. This is what makes it so addictive.<\/p>\n

But if the immune system could be trained to recognize and bind nicotine molecules in the blood, before they reach the brain, then the addiction loop would be short-circuited, and people could more easily quit smoking, he says.<\/p>\n

Burkhard, who is also a faculty member in the Institute of Materials Science, has been working on vaccines for diseases like malaria for the last decade. Like a vaccine for a disease, the nicotine vaccine would introduce a foreign substance \u2013 a virus-like particle with nicotine molecules attached to it \u2013 into the body. Because the compound looks to the immune system like a virus and thus appears to be potentially harmful, immune cells would generate antibodies that can specifically bind nicotine.<\/p>\n

Once such antibodies are in circulation in the bloodstream, as soon as a person smokes a cigarette, the antibodies would bind the nicotine before it reaches the brain, preventing a buzz.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis could work for people who are already addicted,\u201d says Burkhard.<\/p>\n

Scientists have been trying to create a compound that can do this for more than 20 years. But until now, the vaccine carriers used to present nicotine to the immune system have had limited success, generating sufficient antibodies in only 30 percent of people tested.<\/p>\n

The promise of Burkhard\u2019s new compound is its ability to provoke a response by the immune system. The immune system of humans recognizes pathogens that have three major features: they\u2019re peptides (fragments of protein); they\u2019re really tiny (less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair); and they have a repetition of the same peptide patterns on their surface.<\/p>\n

Burkhard\u2019s new carrier fits all these characteristics better than any previously used, which gives it an advantage.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have reason to think it will create a stronger immune response than the other carriers tested as nicotine vaccines,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The nanoparticle carrier molecule developed by Burkhard and his colleagues to deliver nicotine to the immune system. The red portions on the edges represent nicotine molecules. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The compound is made up of proteins that assemble themselves into a nanoparticle. But since it\u2019s made of proteins, says Burkhard, the compound isn\u2019t toxic like some other nanomaterials.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s no different than any other protein your body uses on a daily basis,\u201d he says. \u201cYou could eat it if you wanted to, and it wouldn\u2019t harm you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burkhard emphasizes that the vaccine would not protect against any other risks of tobacco use, such as lung cancer and heart problems. The goal, he says, is to help people quit by breaking their addiction to nicotine.<\/p>\n

The goal of his grant will be to test the compound\u2019s safety in clinical trials. These tests will observe different reactions to the drug to help the researchers optimize it for use in the general population.<\/p>\n

Burkhard was only 29 when his older brother, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer. Even today, the numbers of nicotine-related deaths are staggering to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we manage to make a nicotine vaccine that works, that\u2019s huge,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Burkhard will conduct his clinical trials with colleague and medical doctor Thomas Cerny, who is head of the oncology department at the hospital Kantonsspital St. Gallen in Switzerland. Two post-doctoral researchers will be hired to work on the project at UConn.<\/p>\n

To learn more, go to the NIDA announcement page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A UConn scientist has received NIH support to develop a vaccine against the effects of nicotine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":47239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2076,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-47465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-12 16:40:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47465"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47858,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47465\/revisions\/47858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/47239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47465"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=47465"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=47465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}