NEW ORLEANS -- Even though people know smoking is the top killer in the U.S., it is still one of the hardest addictions to overcome. But what if a vaccine could help make quitting easier?
Now you may qualify for groundbreaking research going on in this area.
A local 25-year-old man has already been smoking for 10 years.
"It's just everyone was doing it, peer pressure," he said about how he got started.
He knows that nicotine is powerful addictive drug that works on the brain.
"It feels like there is something definitely there that's telling me that I can't put it down. If I do certain things, it's just something that comes natural. If I have a cup of coffee in the morning, I feel like I have to have a cigarette with it," he said.
But now he is hoping to enroll in a study of a brand new treatment, so the drug company does not want us to give out his name. The treatment is a vaccine, that if it works, could keep him from getting that rush or pleasure associated with smoking.
"It relaxes me. I feel like it's something that I do for myself. If I'm having a bad day, it's seems to be my friend and calms me down," he said, describing the feeling he gets from a cigarette.
In Metairie, Internal Medicine Specialist Dr. Robert Jeanfreau of Benchmark Research is running one of only 22 sites in the country testing a potential smoking cessation vaccine called NicVAX.
"We use vaccines extensively, primarily for infectious diseases. This is a little unusual in that it is not an infectious disease," Dr. Jeanfreau said about the investigational vaccine.
Here's how it works: In less than a minute after inhaling on a cigarette, the nicotine goes into the lungs, gets picks up by the blood stream and then crosses into the brain. Once in the brain, it hooks up with nicotine receptors triggering the release of a chemical that gives the smoker a reward of pleasurable sensations.
But the vaccine is designed to have your immune system think nicotine is a foreign invader, like a virus, so it makes antibodies, or fighter cells, that grab onto the nicotine and make it too big to pass from the blood into the brain, so it can't give you the pleasure reward.
"The behavior gets exterminated. Since you don't get the reward, the behavior eventually will be extinguished," Dr. Jeanfreau explained.
If the young man qualifies for the study, he will have to commit to 20 visits for a year. He'd get six injections and keep an electronic journal of how he feels. He will also get behavior modification counseling. It is free and patients will be compensated for time and travel. But the benefit of the study could be life changing.
"The health effects of smoking are just tremendous," said Dr. Jeanfreau. "I mean getting people to quit smoking is a big part of my job. It's not just lung cancer but it's heart disease and all kinds of cancer and peripheral arterial disease (PAD), emphysema. It's a terrible health hazard."
To qualify for the study, you have to be a healthy adult between 18 and 65 years old who wants to quit smoking.
Call Benchmark Research at 1-800-369-2875.
