Nicotine-Chomping Bacteria Could Help Smokers Quit

This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. Got a minute?
Quitting smoking is tough, so tough that only about 5 percent of smokers who try to quit in a given year actually succeed.
Medications can double those odds, which still leaves a high failure rate.
And a promising vaccine, meant to arouse an immune response to nicotine, could not beat a placebo in clinical trials.
But researchers haven't given up on a vaccine yet.
Instead of revving up the immune system, though, they've come up with a new idea:
why not use an enzyme to break down nicotine, before it gives you a buzz?
"For almost 50 years there's been reports of bacteria that can actually use nicotine to thrive on."
Kim Janda, a chemist and immunologist at The Scripps Research Institute.
"The bacteria uses nicotine as its sole source of carbon and nitrogen."
It does the trick with a nicotine-chomping enzyme.
So Janda and his colleagues added the enzyme to mouse serum, doped with a cigarette's worth of nicotine.
The enzyme was stable at human body temperature, and was able to cut the half-life of nicotine from a couple hours to less than 15 minutes, that is, it greatly accelerated nicotine's disappearance.
The study is in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
But Janda says the enzyme isn't ready for primetime yet.
It's bacterial, so "you're going to get an immune response, immune surveillance from it."
And right now, the other important half-life, that of the enzyme in serum, is only 3 days.
So it won't stick around long enough to be an effective vaccine.
"A month would be great, a week or two would also be reasonable."
While the researchers work out the kinks, smokers will have to rely on the tried-and-true methods of quitting: counseling, medication or good old cold turkey.
Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber.