New skin implant ‘could CURE cocaine addiction – breaking down the drug in 20 minutes’
There's no current cure for cocaine addiction, but scientists now say that they might have found an answer
COCAINE addicts might soon have an alternative to going through long painful stints in rehab if they want to get clean.
A pioneering new treatment involving skin grafts is said to destroy the cocaine, breaking the drug down before it can cause the addictive "high".
Tests in mice have shown the treatment works in just 20 minutes, scientists at the University of Chicago found.
They said it could help prevent thousands of deaths from cocaine overdose in the future.
Scientists took skin cells from the mice, and added in an extra gene.
That gene makes an enzyme that is able to rapidly break down and destroy cocaine in the bloodstream.
The idea is that scientists would take the genetically modified skin cells and replicate them, to create an implant that sits permanently under an addict's skin.
To test their theory, the scientists, led by Professor Ming Xu, and Dr Xiaoyang Wu, studied two groups of mice - one given the skin graft, and another control group.
Both were given doses of cocaine.
Within 20 minutes, the skin graft had broken down a standard dose of cocaine injected into the mice.
In the control group - given no treatment - it took almost two hours for the drug to break down.
Cocaine addition in the UK
According to official figures released last month, there were 432 deaths related to cocaine in England and Wales in 2017, compared with 112 in 2011.
Cocaine can kill people by causing heart attacks, heart failure or strokes - and the risks increase when used in conjunction with alcohol and other drugs.
At 9.7%, more people report having used cocaine in the UK than anywhere else in Europe.
Powdered cocaine is the second most commonly used drug in the UK after cannabis, with 2.6% of 16- to 59-year-olds, or 875,000 people reporting having used it in the last year.
There's no real "cure" for cocaine addiction as yet - it's therapy or withdrawal (and neither is especially pleasant).
However, according to the NHS, 61 per cent of people who received treatment for a powder cocaine addiction did manage to stop using within six months.
The team concluded this is a two-pronged approach: destroying cocaine in the bloodstream and disrupting the high.
The mice given the skin graft didn't experience the "pleasure hit" in the brain, caused by the neurotransmitter, dopamine.
The control group, in contrast, did experience the addictive "high".
Prof Xu said he believes the treatment will be equally as effective in humans, as mice.
"It will work, like in mice, by highly efficiently degrading cocaine as soon as it enters the blood circulation so that little would reach the brain,"
“People addicted to cocaine would stop using it, and there would be no cocaine-induced relapses."
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He also tested the prototype on human versions of the organoids - this time using the foreskin cells of newborn babies.
Like the mice, they produced the necessary high-killing enzyme continuously for about two months.
While all of the control mice died after being given the highest cocaine doses, some of the mice that were originally treated are still healthy and have active organoids after six months - suggesting that this treatment could be long-lasting in patients.
John Marsden, professor of addiction psychology at London's Institute of Psychiatry said: “I would expect this medication could prove effective when partnered with cognitive behavioural therapy to help people interpret and better cope with distressing cocaine craving.
“It’s very encouraging that research in the US remains undaunted by the stubbornness of cocaine use disorder to respond to treatment, and I remain optimistic we’ll see an evidence-based medication.”
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