Hapten Design for Anti-addiction Vaccine Development

The key scientific challenge in the emerging field of drugs of abuse vaccines is the delineation of the complex factors that determine the immune response to the target drug following administration with a chosen hapten. A concise summary is presented of all the various elements of hapten design for the four major drugs of abuse, along with comparative analysis of their relevance and strategic importance using the results of published immunization studies. The central theme is the difficulty in identifying robust, transferable strategies to increase vaccine efficacy given the inter-study variability in experimental factors that would ideally be standardized across the field. Nonetheless, advances made both rationally and empirically in hapten and vaccine design are progressing towards the efficacious treatment of addiction.