As overdose deaths ravage the United States, researchers seek solutions to curb drug addiction.

How do you produce a scientist who is working to develop a vaccine that not only treats heroin addiction but prevents HIV?

You give a kid a chemistry set.

“As a young boy, I was just curious about how things work, and being exposed to science in school led me to believe that was something I wanted to do,” recalls Gary Matyas (PhD S’85). “As a young boy, I had a chemistry set. And I did many things with the chemistry set. I think that exploration with the chemistry set really is in a way what set me off.”

Matyas’s venture sounds almost like science fiction: developing a combination vaccine that could treat heroin addiction and at the same time prevent HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infection. Left untreated, the immune system-attacking virus can lead to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). 

Yet, his is only one of a series of Purdue-connected efforts to address the opioid crisis, which, despite responses at the federal and state level, continues to be devastating.

On average, opioid overdoses are killing 115 Americans per day according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers such as oxycodone and Fentanyl are among the drugs whose abuse has skyrocketed. The US Department of Health and Human Services has twice extended a 2017 declaration that the opioid crisis is a public health emergency. 

60% of the more than 63,600 drug overdose deaths in 2016 involved an opioid

“It’s not a simple problem. It’s a complex problem that requires a lot of stakeholders,” says Paul Griffin, director of the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering and professor of industrial engineering. He helps coordinate initiatives among various campus departments to attack the opioid issue. 

Many are well underway, including the work of Jacqueline Linnes, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering whose efforts to fight opioids extends to high-tech ventures such as smartwatches. “I like the idea of that because, if it’s integrated into a smartwatch, it doesn’t have to become something with a stigma,” she says.

Heroin-AIDS vaccine

You might not expect the American military to be at the forefront of fighting the AIDS virus and opiate abuse. But then there is Matyas, a biologist who is employed by the US Army and is working to develop the combination vaccine. A tall order? Yes. But Matyas has already moved from animal testing to pursue a grant for testing on humans. In medical research, that is major progress down a long road. 

That Matyas is trying to fight both HIV and heroin is all the more mind-blowing considering how daunting both are individually.

There is no effective cure yet for HIV. More than one million people in the US are living with the virus, which is most commonly spread through sexual behaviors and needle or syringe use, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, roughly one million Americans per year use heroin, according to the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Abuse of the highly addictive drug increases the risk of spreading HIV because of the sharing of syringes.

Matyas’s boyhood dabbling with his chemistry set led to his earning a bachelor’s in biophysics at Penn State before arriving at Purdue in 1978. His doctoral research at Purdue focused on cancer and “really set the tone of my career for the rest of my life,” he says. After postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, Matyas in 1988 joined his current employer, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in Silver Spring, Maryland. Established in 1893, it is the largest biomedical research facility serving the Department of Defense. Protecting the blood supply is a key mission.

More than 1 million people in the US are living with HIV.

“The army itself works on the concept of a walking blood supply,” Matyas explains. “If a soldier is wounded in the field and needs a transfusion, they will do transfusions. The army doesn’t want to transfer HIV from one soldier to another. What is one major cause of the spread of HIV in the world? It’s injection drug use, primarily heroin. Because of that, we felt that we could decrease the spread of HIV if we developed a heroin vaccine or a combination vaccine.”

In 2012, Matyas won a five-year, $5 million “avant-garde” grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for his proposal to develop a vaccine that can treat heroin addiction while at the same time prevent HIV infection in people who receive the vaccine.

By 2017, with animal testing complete and plans for human testing underway, Matyas started earning media coverage. “The idea is, for the heroin, we induce molecules in the blood called antibodies that when someone injects heroin, they grab onto the heroin and prevent it from going into the brain where heroin has its action,” Matyas told a Baltimore TV station. Meanwhile, Business Insider described Matyas as being in, as he called it, a friendly vaccine development race with a California researcher. The mainstream coverage helps make it clear that the end goal, while years away, is to have tangible effects, even if so much of the current work is contained to a laboratory.

“A WRAIR motto is ‘soldier health, world health,’” Matyas says. “And I think that’s really fundamentally what’s satisfying about it. I’m in a position now where I can develop these things that will actually be involved in vaccines that will ultimately protect people from heroin abuse and infectious diseases.”

Matyas says that while his work toward a dual vaccine has proceeded without major setbacks, it is reaching a stage where doubts about the dual approach might affect future development. Traditionally, a vaccine would be tested and developed either with the goal of preventing heroin addiction or preventing HIV transmission, but not both. 

“We put them together because we’re an HIV program, and we wanted the heroin vaccine to reduce HIV,” Matyas says. “But from a purely scientific rationale, there is no real reason those two vaccines should be codeveloped. Honestly, I don’t know if the potential funders are there to develop human clinical trials together.”

So Matyas plans to prepare a grant request for the human clinical trial of the heroin vaccine first, then seek a grant for human testing of the combination vaccine. Perhaps success with the continued work on the heroin vaccine would improve the chances for getting funding for future development of the combination vaccine.

40% of all opioid overdose deaths involve a prescription opioid

“What I think is rewarding is, it’s a career of doing what was for me basic research science, and now it’s transitioning more into use. That’s always the goal of a research scientist — to do something that’s very useful for humanity,” Matyas says. “Will these formulations be in a licensed vaccine before I retire? I doubt it, but I think ultimately they will be.”

High-tech efforts

Linnes, meanwhile, contributes to research at Purdue on a number of high-tech products, including the smartwatch, that are aimed at fighting opioid abuse.

As Linnes put it, it’s a “smartwatch on steroids” that can measure not only a person’s heart rate but also respiration and oxygen. 

“And what that translates to, is, if somebody has an overdose, then their heart rate doesn’t necessarily change, but their respiration fluctuates and, essentially, you forget how to breathe,” Linnes explains. “So, if you can detect that and the decreases in oxygen in your blood, you could monitor if somebody is having an overdose.”

Also in development is a smartwatch that would connect to a phone app that could call for help or send an alert in the case of a possible overdose.

“Ultimately, I’m hoping to get this to collaborators at the University of British Columbia, where they have a clinic where they actually have people inject with whatever drugs they are using,” Linnes says. “There, they can monitor them for overdose directly, but we also just want to get opinions from individuals that might be the users for this device.”

Another approach is research to better understand what triggers a person to use opioids. The aim again is to collaborate with the University of British Columbia, where patients allow researchers to track their phones to see where the patients go. “And they can tell when it looks like they went back to where they used to use drugs, but they don’t know if they actually do unless they take a urine test — and that tells them only in the last couple of days,” Linnes says. 

“We’re working with them to detect the molecules that are excreted. They want to be able to develop more targeted, personalized interventions. To say, OK, if you go to the place that you used to purchase drugs, or we see that you have a stressful event that happened, how long do we have before we can intervene — can a caseworker or a sponsor call you and say, ‘Hey let’s sit down and have a cup of coffee, you don’t have to do this today,’ something like that — rather than wait until people relapse.” 

Learn More Online

Purdue Extension launched a website extension.purdue.edu/opioids that provides information on important programs available to Indiana residents. The site also offers access to other resources, such as a webinar series, videos and printed materials.