Scientists at a Chilean university have spent the last year working on an "alcohol vaccine" in an attempt to decrease the number of alcoholics in the world today. The aim is that after being administered the vaccine, any person imbibing alcohol would immediately experience an intense hangover, which would deter the drinker from indulging further.
The hangover is characterized by extreme nausea, rapid heartbeat and overall discomfort.
The vaccine, which is still under development by the Universidad de Chile's Director of the Institute for Cell Dynamics and Biotechnology Dr. Juan Asenjo and his team, functions by relaying a kind of biochemical alert to the drinker's liver and causing the organ to cease metabolizing alcohol.
The vaccine's effects — lasting between six months and one year — are irreversible.
Dr. Asenjo's research is built on studies gathered from 20 percent of the Japanese, Chinese and Korean population who live with a unique alcohol intolerance mutation (similar to lactose intolerance).
These alcohol-intolerant individuals lack the ability to produce an enzyme necessary for the liver to properly metabolize alcohol before allowing for the ill effects of a hangover. The vaccine inhibits the synthesis of the enzyme — a degraded permutation of another naturally occurring enzyme called acetaldehyde — thus leading the body to react the same way as the aforementioned mutants.
A recent series of tests conducted on mice have shown successful results, with 50 percent of vaccinated mice decreasing their alcohol cravings after a 30-day period.
Asenjo expects to conduct phase-one human trials by the end of 2013, with pre-clinical tests of mice to soon take place in Mumbai, India.
The fact that Asenjo says the vaccine will be cheaply purchased might account for why pharmaceutical companies have yet to express interest in the vaccine.
"Addiction is a psychological disease, a social disease," says Asenjo. "Obviously this is only the biological part of it."
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