The Development of Antibody-based Immunotherapy for Methamphetamine Abuse: Immunization, and Virus-Mediated Gene Transfer Approaches

Methamphetamine is a highly addictive psychostimulant that has been seriously abused worldwide, and currently there are no approved medications for the treatment of its abuse. Conventional treatments for drug addiction mainly seek to use small molecule agonists or antagonists to target the drug receptors in the brain, but unfortunately it is difficult to find a similar small molecule for the treatment of methamphetamine dependence. Alternatively, anti-methamphetamine antibodies can sequester the drug in the bloodstream and reduce the amount of drug available to the central nervous system, acting as peripheral pharmacokinetic antagonists. This review describes the development of antibody-based immunotherapies, classified into active and passive immunizations, for the treatment of methamphetamine addiction. Furthermore, an alternative therapeutic approach, using a recombinant adeno-associated virus-mediated gene transfer technique to achieve in vivo expression of characterized anti-methamphetamine monoclonal antibodies, is proposed in this article.