ABOVE: © ISTOCK, NOSYSTEM IMAGES
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 ...
