“It’s a brilliant idea”, Onno van Schayck, professor of preventive medicine at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML), told Observant in 2002. The vaccine stimulates the production of proteins that bind to nicotine molecules, making them too large to reach the brain and trigger the release of dopamine. The result: smoking becomes less pleasurable and, theoretically, easier to give up.
The US pharmaceutical company Nabi had been working on a vaccine for some time. Trials with rats and guinea pigs had been successful. For the next step – trials with human participants – the company approached Maastricht University, which already had a strong reputation for research on smoking cessation. By early 2003, the search for participants was underway.
High expectations
The media were quick to take notice. The Dutch NOS Journaal, CNN and German television contacted UM’s Extra research institute (now part of CAPHRI). To Observant, lead researcher Van Schayck admitted that he wasn’t entirely thrilled by the attention: it wouldn’t help if expectations were too high. Still, Dutch media continued to follow the research closely over the next few years, from AD and De Telegraaf to de Volkskrant.
And so the general public was able to witness the many obstacles and setbacks that usually happen behind the scenes. The study almost immediately hit a snag due to a lack of participants. It was easy to find thirty smokers – who would have to continue smoking for 38 weeks to ensure reliable results – but non-smokers and ex-smokers, needed for a non-smoking control group, were less eager to undergo the injections.
Race against time
After a rocky start, the first positive results were reported in 2005. The vaccine did, as hoped, trigger the production of antibodies against nicotine, with hardly any side effects. But this did not necessarily mean it actually helped people quit smoking. While the vaccine took the pleasure out of smoking, it didn’t take away the craving. The next step involved providing support in the form of counselling and anti-smoking pills to around six hundred smokers who wanted to kick the habit, half of whom received the vaccine.
Researchers also explored what exactly happened in the brain and considered the ethical implications. What if parents wanted to vaccinate their children preventively? Or if tobacco companies started exploiting the idea in their advertising that addiction could be more easily overcome?
Meanwhile, the study became a race against time. Two pharmaceutical companies in Switzerland and England had both developed similar vaccines, each hoping to bring theirs to market first. But UM was still ahead, Van Schayck told Observant in 2005. “I expect our vaccine to hit the market within two to four years.”
Disappointment
But that didn’t happen. By the end of 2007, research came to a halt. The financial crisis was in full swing and the American client, Nabi, was in financial trouble. The study did not resume until 2009.
And it ended in disappointment. In 2014, twelve years after the first promising reports, the vaccine was shown to offer no significant benefit. Smokers who received it were no more likely to quit than participants given a placebo. Nabi, now acquired by another company, abandoned the project, and competing vaccines also failed.
Van Schayk’s response was down-to-earth: “It took a lot of time and energy, we had high expectations (...) but that’s the nature of research – you never know what you’ll find.”