Cytos Biotechnology, based on Zurich, Switzerland announced their results from a large-scale clinical trial for their new antibody formula to help people quit smoking by preventing nicotine from reaching the brain. This new vaccine could be a boon for the millions of people who say they want to quit smoking but have thus far been unable too.
The numbers were encouraging to researchers with nearly 60% quitting smoking all together and another 16% cutting back their smoking consumption. Two thirds of the smokers received the vaccine, whereas one third received placebo. All smokers who received the vaccine mounted an anti-nicotine antibody response, which corresponds to an immunological response rate of 100%. Based on the measured levels of antibodies, the vaccine treated smokers were grouped into a high, a medium, and a low responder group. All smokers who received placebo had no measurable anti-nicotine antibodies in their blood.
Prof. Dr. Jacques Cornuz commented: “I am very excited about the outcome of this study, as the data clearly suggest that antibodies against nicotine are effective in helping people quit smoking. There is certainly no doubt that new approaches such as vaccination are urgently needed. Despite the fact that smoking causes 30% of all cancer deaths, including 87% of deaths from lung cancer, there are 1.3 billion smokers worldwide. And each smoker looses on average more than 10 years of lifetime as a result from this serious addiction. I believe that the vaccine approach has the potential to dramatically alter the way how we will treat smoking addiction in the future.”
Smoking Is Ugly
The World Health Organization (WHO) says 1.3 billion smoke in the world and attribute 5 million deaths ever year to smoking. WHO say 30% of all cancers are related in part to smoking and 87% of all lung cancers come from smoking. The way this vaccine works is to stop the nicotine from reaching the brain.
Nicotine, an alkaloid derived from tobacco leaves, has been shown to be the principal addictive component of tobacco. Upon inhalation of cigarette smoke, nicotine passes into the bloodstream and within seconds penetrates through the blood-brain barrier, where it stimulates specific neurons in the brain. Stimulation of these neurons leads to the release of messenger molecules, which give rise to an almost immediate reward and a feeling of pleasure. This sensory stimulus is critical to the addictive properties of nicotine and causes a high relapse rate after quitting attempts. Although nearly 75% of smokers in the U.S. report that they want to quit smoking, less than 5% of those who try quitting are able to stay tobacco-free for 3 to 12 months (Surgeon’s General Report, USA, 2004).
The Way It Works
CYT002-NicQb is a therapeutic vaccine in development for treatment of nicotine addiction. The vaccine is a bacteriophage or a type of virus. Vaccination with CYT002-NicQb induces nicotine-specific antibodies that bind nicotine in the blood and reduce nicotine uptake into the brain. In this way, activity of nicotine in the brain should be reduced and the addiction-driving and satisfaction-inducing stimulus of nicotine minimized. CYT002-NicQb aims to prevent relapses after quitting and thus help people to break their addiction to nicotine in the long term.
Dr. Wolfgang Renner, Chief Executive Officer of Cytos Biotechnology, added: “We are extremely pleased about the results as the data in the high responder group are better than anything we have seen so far. The clear correlation between antibody levels and clinical effect greatly supports us in the further development of this vaccine. It is now our goal to get everybody into this high antibody response range; and to achieve this we have several measures at hand:
A) We will increase the dose of the vaccine, as we have already done with other clinical candidates in different indications,
B) We can add more injections as even after the fourth injection there appeared to be no antibody plateau, and
C) we will certainly use these findings in our ongoing formulation development.
But most importantly, the data show elegantly that we can use the body’s own defence, the immune system, to modulate even such complex conditions like addiction. This finding is extremely important with respect to our pipeline of 27 vaccine candidates in other major disease areas like high blood pressure, obesity or Alzheimer’s disease where we use the same basic ImmunodrugTM principle.”
More information about the phase II study, the vaccine candidate CYT002-NicQb and general information about smoking and nicotine addiction can be found on www.smokersvaccine.com.
John Stith is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
