First ever treatment for cocaine addiction? Gene-edited skin graft could stop overdoses and curb cravings, study suggests
- Cocaine was involved in nearly 15,000 deaths in the US last year
- Heroin-use is finally falling in the US, but cocaine has bounced back
- There are currently no overdose-reversal or addiction treatment drugs for coke
- University of Chicago Medical Center researchers found that an enzyme-enriched skin graft could do for coke what Naloxone does for opioids in mice
A skin graft may be the key to the first ever treatment for cocaine addiction and overdose, a new study suggests.
More than 900,000 Americans are addicted to cocaine and there is no medication to help them break the potentially fatal habit.
A newly-developed gene therapy skin graft could change that, however.
Researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) discovered that by grafting skin cells modified with a gene therapy onto cocaine-addicted mice, they both keep the animals from overdosing and curb their desires for the drug.
More than 900,000 Americans use and abuse cocaine, and there has been no nope for addiction treatment or overdose reversal – until now, a new study done in mice suggests
Concerns over cocaine abuse have taken a bit of a back seat in recent years, as the opioid epidemic’s fatal grip on the US became a top public health priority.
But last week, the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health revealed that heroin use finally started to fall off in the US in 2017.
Meanwhile, marijuana, meth and cocaine have seen resurgences.
In 2017, cocaine was involved in the deaths of 14,556 Americans.
That number pales in comparison the 72,000 killed by opioids the same year, but the no matter what the drug, these overdoses would be preventable if the illegal substances were avoided altogether or better treatment for addiction and overdose was accessible.
The advent and increasingly widespread adoption of the opioid overdose reversal drug, Naloxone, has begun to fill that void for heroin, fentanyl and painkiller users.
In 2015, Naloxone administration saved the lives of 27,000 Americans – and the drug has only been distributed and used more widely in the years since.
But there is no such equivalent for cocaine overdoses, which can prove to be similarly deadly, but by vastly different mechanisms.
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Opioids are system depressants, which can slow the nervous system to the point that breathing stops altogether.
Cocaine, on the other hand, is a powerful stimulant. As it pumps through the blood system, coke can make the heart race, raising the blood pressure and causing heart attacks and seizures.
It doesn’t have such dramatic effects as frequently as opioids do, but once the symptoms set in, there is no drug designed just to stop the overdose.
And if one does survive an overdose, and decides to quit cocaine, there’s no equivalent to methadone or buprenorphine to help take the edge off withdrawals – a quitting aid proven to increase the odds of kicking a habit.
But that may not be the case for long, if the UCMC development works as well in humans as it has in mice.
Researchers there had previously discovered a enzyme – called butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) – that quickly breaks down cocaine.
Powerful though BChE is, when the scientists simply injected it into mice, the enzyme didn’t last long enough to do much for the addicted animals.
Instead, the team led by senior study author Dr Ming Xu and Dr Xiaonyang Wu came up with a clever work around.
Using the CRISPR gene editing system, they introduced DNA for the enzyme to the genetic code of skin cells cultured fro mice.
The enzyme genes did not disturb the rest of the DNA, but since they were encoded into the animals’ cells, the enzyme would continuously replicate, lasting longer in their bodies.
Dr Wu and his sub-group were responsible for transplanting the cocaine-busting skin grafts onto the addicted mice.
Once they had successfully been transferred, the small bits of genetically-modified skin released the enzyme into the mice’s bloodstreams.
Remarkably, these mice were able to survive doses of cocaine that would have otherwise been 100 fatal to them.
And equally importantly, the mice no longer seemed to want or crave cocaine.
The researchers began their experiments when the mice were just babies.
They are now pleased to report that the oldest of the animals are a year old, and healthy, suggesting that the benefits of their experimental therapy may be long-lasting.
‘Taken together, our results show promise of cutaneous gene therapy as a safe and cost-effective therapeutic option for cocaine abuse in the future,’ the authors wrote.
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