David Scott Wilson, PhD

Opioid addiction is a national medical crisis that is expected to worsen due to the socioeconomic fallout caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Opioid vaccines are a promising treatment strategy for preventing opioid overdose and could enhance drug treatment when combined with existing modalities. The aim of vaccination is to generate opioid-specific antibodies that circulate in the serum to neutralize opioids, thus preventing overdose and the sensation sought by the user. However, given the inherent challenges of repeated vaccination, effective opioid vaccines must induce long-lasting, opioid-specific antibody responses. Here, we present a biomaterials-based strategy for engineering durable opioid-specific antibody responses. Our platform is designed to localize the delivery of various activating agents to the cells that produce opioid-specific antibodies, thus increasing the magnitude and durability of the opioid-specific antibody response while limiting the toxicity of these agents. If successful, our project will yield a clinically-viable therapy for preventing opioid overdose and demonstrate the efficacy of a platform that can be easily modified to treat other forms of drug addiction.