Immunotherapy as a treatment to confront the ongoing opioid epidemic- A review

Substance use disorders continue to be major medical and social problems worldwide. The use of opiate has grown substantially over the past three decades reaching the dimensions of a global epidemic. Current drug treatments have many limitations: long treatment times, dependency on treatment medications, relapses after treatment, high costs of treatment, and non-adherence by affected persons. Most of the available drug treatments for opiate addiction belong to the opioid family. Some worry that the availability of the drugs may simply cause substituting one opioid medication for another. Immunotherapy has a great potential of becoming an additional therapeutic strategy in the treatment of addiction. Immunotherapy also prevents overdose of treatment drugs. This monograph reviews preclinical studies of immunotherapy and experiments using treatments with three different immunomodifiers that were able to significantly attenuate the severity of opioid withdrawal symptoms in morphine dependent animals. These immunotherapy treatments are short, and will prevent relapse of opioid dependency and toxicity.