By Whitney Blair Wyckoff, CQ Staff

Growing evidence has shown that vaccines and antibody medications could prove effective at treating drug and nicotine addiction, said scientists at a Capitol Hill briefing.

Research in this field is encouraging — there have been successful animal trials and a few promising human trials — but studies would progress faster if pharmaceutical companies were more invested, they said during Tuesday’s briefing sponsored by the Friends of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Since drugs to treat addiction often target a small sector of the population, drug companies tend to shy away from investments in this area, they said, the exception being drugs that address tobacco addiction.

People who are addicted to drugs or tobacco have such a strong memory association with the positive effects they feel when using drugs that it inhibits their abilities to control their urge for another fix. Vaccines and antibody medications would make the memory association less powerful because when administered, they make it more difficult to achieve the desired high, said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Volkow said the goal of the medicines is to stimulate a response from the immune system so the body fights off the drug as if it were a disease. Vaccines work by triggering the body to produce antibodies to destroy drug molecules.

“If you can learn that the drug is no longer desirable, you can decrease the effect on that memory,” Volkow said. Vaccine test subjects take time to develop the antibodies, so a vaccine is unlikely to throw the body into extreme withdrawal, said researchers.

S. Michael Owens, professor and director of the University of Arkansas’ drug research center and chief scientific officer of InterveXion Therapeutics LLC, said antibody medications he is working on to treat methamphetamine would have an immediate effect because the body wouldn’t need time to develop antibodies itself.

But such medicines are not a “silver bullet,” Owens stressed.

“This is intended for individuals who are interested in going into a treatment program,” he said. “I don’t see any of these drugs standing alone.”