Brazil, the world’s second-largest consumer of cocaine, has announced the development of an innovative new treatment for addiction to the expensive drug and its powerful derivative, crack: a vaccine.

As reported by the Agence France-Presse (AFD), with the name “Calixcoca”, the experimental vaccine had particularly encouraging results in tests carried out on laboratory animals.

The vaccine can and does trigger an immune response that prevents cocaine and crack from reaching the brain, raising researchers’ hopes of helping users break the “cycle” of addiction.

Simply put, those who were addicted to cocaine are no longer addicted to that particular drug.

“If the vaccine treatment receives approval from the competent authorities, it will be the first time that cocaine addiction will be combated with a vaccine,” said psychiatrist Frederico Garcia, coordinator of the team that developed the injectable formula at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. ».

The team that developed the vaccine won the top prize last week – worth €500,000 – at the Euro Health Innovation for Medicine awards in Latin America, sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Eurofarma.

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The vaccine works by triggering patients’ immune systems to produce antibodies that bind to cocaine molecules in the bloodstream, making them too large to invade the brain’s “reward center,” where the drug normally stimulates high levels of pleasure, dopamine.

Similar studies have been conducted in the United States, the “number 1 consumer of cocaine in the world,” according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

But they stopped when, among other things, clinical trials did not show encouraging results, Garcia points out.