There are nicotine patches to help quit smoking, and then there’s this: patches of actual skin, genetically engineered to produce an enzyme that digests cocaine, and, when transplanted onto mice, arms them against otherwise-lethal doses of the drug. A study on the skin-patch strategy, which the authors hope could one day lead to a means of treating addiction and preventing overdoses in humans, appears today (September 17) in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

“Cocaine addiction is very common . . . but right now there’s no treatment at all to either prevent addictive behavior or [treat] cocaine overdose—there’s no FDA-approved drug,” says Xiaoyang Wu, a stem cell researcher at the University of Chicago and coauthor of the study.

Wu’s team had previously used CRISPR gene editing to make a skin patch with cells that manufactured insulin for diabetic mice, and he wondered whether the principle could also work for cocaine addiction. According to one survey, more than 900,000 Americans abuse the drug. So Wu teamed up with Ming Xu, an addiction researcher also at the University of Chicago, to conduct the experiment.

…continue reading ‘Gene-Edited Skin Patch Prevents Cocaine Overdose in Mice’

Image via Flickr  Some rights reserved by theglobalpanorama

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