TSRI Scientists Design Nicotine Vaccine at Provokes Robust Immune Response

TSRI Scientists Design Nicotine Vaccine that Provokes Robust Immune Response Insights Could Help Scientists Develop Treatments for Smoking as Well as Other Addictions

LA JOLLA, CA January 12, 2015 When a promising nicotine vaccine failed in clinical trials a few years ago, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) were determined to keep trying to help smokers overcome their addiction.

Now the team has designed a more effective nicotine vaccine and proven that the structures of molecules used in vaccines is critical. The study was published recently in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

This study provides new hope that one could make a nicotine vaccine that succeeds in clinical trials, said Kim Janda, the Ely R. Callaway Jr. Professor of Chemistry and member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at TSRI.

Targeting Nicotine

According to the National Cancer Institute, smoking is the leading cause of eight types of cancer, including lung cancer and fast-moving pancreatic cancer.

Nicotine vaccines train the body to see nicotine as a foreign invader. To prompt this immune response, scientists have tried attaching nicotine derivatives called haptens to a larger carrier protein used in other approved vaccines.

The body reacts to the vaccine by creating antibodies to bind specifically to nicotine molecules. When a person later uses tobacco, the anti-nicotine antibodies stop the nicotine molecules from entering the central nervous system and ever reaching the brain.

Though a vaccine wouldn't be a silver bullet there would still be withdrawal symptoms a person may be less motivated to relapse because the brain's reward system could no longer react to nicotine.

The problem with the previous nicotine vaccine, which only worked in 30 percent of patients, was that it did not single out the most common form of nicotine for attack. Nicotine has two forms that look like mirror images of each other one is a right-handed version and one is a left-handed version. Even though 99 percent of the nicotine found in tobacco is the left-handed version, the previous vaccine elicited antibodies against both.

Janda believes that was a waste of immune response. This is a case where something very simple was overlooked, he said.

Improving the Response

In the new study, the researchers elicited a more robust antibody response by creating a vaccine from only left-handed nicotine haptens. To do this, they prepared haptens as a 50-50 mixture and as pure right-handed or pure left-handed versions of nicotine, so they could use the two versions together or separately.

They tested both versions and the 50-50 mix in rat models, injecting the rats three times over 42 days. This series of booster shots gave the animals' immune systems a chance to create an effective number of antibodies to respond to nicotine.

The researchers analyzed blood from the three experimental groups and found that the left-handed hapten elicited a much more effective immune response. Compared with the right-handed hapten vaccine, the left-handed hapten vaccine prompted the body to create four times as many antibodies against left-handed nicotine molecules. The 50-50 mix was only 60 percent as effective as the pure left-handed version.

This shows that future vaccines should target that left-handed version, said Jonathan Lockner, research associate in the Janda lab and first author of the new paper. There might even be more effective haptens out there.

The researchers believe purifying nicotine hapten mixtures is an important and practical step in creating future nicotine vaccines. Janda said considering molecule handed-ness is also critical for developing vaccines against other drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and heroin.

This is just one area where we are looking outside the box to try to treat addiction, Janda said.

In addition to Janda and Lockner, other authors of the paper, A Conjugate Vaccine Using Enantiopure Hapten Imparts Superior Nicotine-Binding Capacity, were Jenny M. Lively and Karen C. Collins of TSRI, and Jana na C. M. Vendruscolo and Marc R. Azar of Behavioral Pharma Inc. For more information, see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jm501625j.

Funding for the research came from the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (20XT-0156).

About The Scripps Research Institute

The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is one of the worlds largest independent, not-for-profit organizations focusing on research in the biomedical sciences. TSRI is internationally recognized for its contributions to science and health, including its role in laying the foundation for new treatments for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia, and other diseases. An institution that evolved from the Scripps Metabolic Clinic founded by philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps in 1924, the institute now employs about 2,700 people on its campuses in La Jolla, CA, and Jupiter, FL, where its renowned scientists including two Nobel laureates work toward their next discoveries. The institutes graduate program, which awards PhD degrees in biology and chemistry, ranks among the top ten of its kind in the nation. For more information, see www.scripps.edu.

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