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Although cocaine vaccines have shown limited clinical benefit (Arch Gen Psychiatry 2009; 66:1116), an easily administered way to prevent substance dependence holds huge appeal, especially if it would not require intense patient compliance. Attempts to expand vaccine research to heroin have been unsuccessful because heroin rapidly metabolizes to acetyl morphine and morphine, so that antibodies cannot act before metabolites reach the brain.
To overcome this problem, these investigators used a vaccine in rats that was hypothesized to dynamically bind both heroin and its metabolites due to the vaccine's multihaptenic structure. Compared with animals given placebo, rats given the vaccine showed high peripheral blood titers of heroin and its metab…