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News from Recent Addiction Meetings

At the June 2006 meeting of the College on the Problems of Drug Dependence, findings from two landmark studies of a cocaine vaccine conducted by Meg Haney, Ph.D., of Columbia University and Thomas Kosten, M.D., of Yale and now Baylor College of Medicine were presented. Dr. Nora Volkow, the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) highlighted these two studies in her overview of significant progress made by NIDA funded investigators over the past year. The Haney study in 10 subjects found that, when active cocaine users were vaccinated over a 3 month period, they had a significant reduction in high and other cocaine effects, when they were given this drug in a laboratory setting. The reduction in cocaine effects paralleled the gradual increase in antibody levels from the vaccine over these three months of four repeated vaccine injections. Dr. Kosten conducted a parallel outpatient clinical trial in 114 cocaine dependent patients, who got five vaccine injections over 3 months. During these three months, antibody levels steadily increased in the actively vaccinated group. Compared to the placebo treated patients, the actively vaccinated showed a significant increase in cocaine-free days based on urine toxicology results. The rate of cocaine-free days increased at twice the rate in the active vs. placebo vaccinated patients. Together, these findings have led the manufacturer, Celtic-Xenova, to join NIDA in a phase 3 multi-site pivotal study of this vaccine in order to obtain FDA approval. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 32: 491, 2006 Copyright Q Informa Healthcare ISSN: 0095-2990 print/1097-9891 online DOI: 10.1080/00952990600917108