Found yourself in the middle of nicotine or cocaine addiction? The government won’t let you down, as it requires drug industry to create a vaccine for that addiction.

Confident in the necessity to apply latest technologies in order to create advanced and effective addiction treatments, the government members are concentrating their efforts on creation of a vaccine as a latest strategy to overcome and even prevent addiction to many addictives.

According to Prof. Natalie Balkow, vice director of the National Institute of Health, such vaccine would be a totally different product to all the smoking cessation therapies currently selling in the market.

“It would be an astonishing progress, if we achieve our objective our developing the vaccine,” Dr. Ryan Winter, leading researcher of National Institute on Drug Abuse said during the annual meeting of neurophysiologists in Boston.

Balkow admitted the agency plans to make use of the huge funding by drug industry in vaccine creation, encouraged by the necessity to develop new products and immense success of such medicines as Gardasil vaccine to kill the bacteria that trigger cervical cancer.

Dr. Winter said that there has been a great number of studies and researches in treatments for cancers and wide range of diseases, and they would apply those findings in their researches.

However, first of all, the National Institute on Drug Abuse would have to convince the drug industry to create the vaccines by investing in expensive clinical tests.

In September, the NIDA gave Nabi Biopharmaceuticals a $10 million subsidy — the largest ever grant in the history of the NIDA — to carry out last-phase clinical tests of the company’s nicotine addiction vaccine, named NicVAX.

Volkow said she did her homework before backing the Nabi vaccine to ensure it was significantly different from other products. “Nonetheless, when you are investing in something at this level, it can be very risky,” she said.

The vaccine is meant to stimulate the immune system to make antibodies against nicotine, blocking its rewarding effects and helping to prevent relapse in smokers trying to quit.

Similar nicotine vaccines developed by Cytos Biotechnology and European pharmaceutical giant Novartis failed to fulfill its major purpose during the third-stage trials, making some experts doubt they will reach the market.

Nevertheless, if it happens, the anti-smoking vaccine could have an unbelievable success, admitted Balkow, mentioning that smoking kills millions each year in every corner of the globe.

The international market for nicotine replacement therapies is predicted to top $4 billion by 2015, whereas effective nicotine vaccines could reach $2 billion or more in sales, in conformity with a market analysis by Datamonitor.

Dr Winter said the identical techniques for developing an anti-smoking vaccine could subsequently used in developing vaccines for preventing addiction to prevent addiction to other hazardous substances like cocaine.

The National Health Institute recently praised a study disclosed earlier this fall over an anti-cocaine vaccine that helped almost 40 percent of addicts who participated in trials.

However, Prof. Balkow said encouraging pharmaceutical industry to develop vaccines for drugs is a quite difficult task due to liability concerns, general stigmatization of drug users and lack of support from the federal authorities.