Health security

SCIENTISTS PROPOSE GENE HACK TO MAKE COCAINE LESS FUN

Mayo Clinic scientists have proposed a new treatment for cocaine addiction, that’s, somehow, taken humans over two millennia to figure out: 

Make it less fun.

Writing in The Conversation, a pair of University of Tennessee scientist report that Mayo Clinic researchers have published a paper with the whimsically longwinded title “Systemic Safety of a Recombinant AAV8 Vector for Human Cocaine Hydrolase Gene Therapy: A Good Laboratory Practice Preclinical Study in Mice.”

Long story short, it appears that injections of a neurotransmitter-regulating human protein produced positive results for reducing cocaine addiction in mice.

Problem is, daily injections are too impractical to be a realistic therapy. So the Mayo researchers asked: Why not use advances in gene therapy to give bodies the instructions to keep making these super-proteins on their own? The initial results of mice trials were so substantial, the FDA has approved the study for humans.