Heroin is a drug with one of the highest mortality rates. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop alternative heroin abuse treatments. Recently, vaccines have been explored as a potential treatment modality for substances of abuse because they do not produce unwanted neurological side effects and have the potential to be utilized as preventive therapeutics against drug overdose. MicroScale Thermophoresis (MST) is a reliable method for measuring antibody binding affinities with a potential for use in vaccine development. Here, we show how the affinity of antibodies to heroin and its major metabolites such as morphine can be detected in a competitive MST assay using a fluorescent heroin analog. Moreover, the assay can even be used to determine affinities of polyclonal antibodies in sera.

antibody – small molecule interaction | heroin hapten | vaccines | competitive assay | MO-P-073