A New Generation Of Smoking Cessation Drugs Holds Promise For Smokers
02/06/07
The plight of the addictive smoker stands alone in the annuls of human history as the greatest form of self-inflicted physiological damage ever known. Even in the modern era of soft tissue diagnostic imaging and point-of-care diagnostics, estimates of th
The plight of the addictive smoker stands alone in the annuls of human history as the greatest form of self-inflicted physiological damage ever known. Even in the modern era of soft tissue diagnostic imaging and point-of-care diagnostics, estimates of the number of smokers who will die in one form or another from their habit range as high as fifty percent.
It is now understood that smokers suffer from a form of chemical dependency not unlike other well-accepted substance addictions. Recent decades have seen the availability of products that attempt to assist smokers who want to break free of their habit, most notably the gums, patches and inhalers of nicotine replacement therapy.
Now a new generation of therapeutic products - one approved and numerous others in development - that treat smoking addiction at the biochemical level represent hope for the legions of smokers who want to break free of their addiction. These therapies - a group that includes neuroreceptor modulators, enzyme inhibitors, and therapeutic vaccines - are approaching this market from more than a half-dozen directions. Their developers include Big Pharma, European biotechnology, and private companies with limited capitalization. All are working toward a market with a total world value in the billions.
These findings are contained in a new and comprehensive report - Smoking Cessation: Next-Generation Targets and Therapies. More information is available at