Expect better vaccines to quit smoking

If researchers could figure out why some smokers are more addicted to nicotine than others, they could work out a way to halt this addiction.

Pradeep K. Garg from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Centre and colleagues at Duke University Medical Centre are conducting research to improve the effectiveness of nicotine vaccination for smokers.

Garg is using positron emission topography (PET) imaging, to see the dynamics of nicotine distribution in human body organs during actual smoking.

"The bottom line is that if we can effectively block nicotine entry in the brain, we will have effective therapy," Garg said.

Understanding why some people are more addicted to nicotine than others will lead to better treatment options.

In the US alone, approximately 47 million adults are smokers and smoking-attributable health care expenditures and productivity losses exceed $190 billion annually.

"Having an accurate understanding of the mechanism of anti-nicotine immunotherapy will help us improve its treatment efficacy and could lead to better patient management and may help develop better vaccines in the future," said Garg.

Immunotherapy is a medical term defined as "treatment of disease by inducing, enhancing, or suppressing an immune response."

Injectable nicotine vaccines have proven to be effective in clinical trials, reducing the incidence of relapse in smokers who have recently quit.

Many researchers believe the vaccines do this by producing antibodies that attach themselves to nicotine, thus preventing it from reaching the brain, making smoking less pleasurable and easier to give up.

That's where Garg and his team are focusing their research, using PET to scan smokers before and after vaccination, says a Wake Forest release.

Garg said anti-nicotine immunotherapy is a relatively new approach that directly targets the absorption and distribution of nicotine in the body.

The research was published recently by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.