14 DAY TRIAL // Intoxication with cocaine is the reason why more than 500,000 emergency room visits take place every single year, in the United States alone. The drug is extremely toxic, and the body can only work so fast in breaking it down and eliminating it. Overdoses therefore occur at a frightening rate, and yet the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no pharmacotherapy guidelines set in place for treating this type of toxicity. But a group of experts took matters into its own hands, and artificially-engineered an enzyme that is capable of breaking down the drug 1,000 times faster than the human body can.
When brought to emergency rooms, drug users can only be treated for the conditions that immediately threaten their lives, as doctors have no means to promoting the removal of the actual drug from their system. This means that the cocaine the patients consumed remains inside their bodies until it's naturally broken down. In the mean time, the harsh chemical continues to wreak havoc on the brain, the liver, as well as the cardiovascular system. It's precisely for this type of circumstances that the CocE enzyme was produced. From now on, emergency room personnel could administer it to incoming cocaine intoxication cases, for minimizing further damage to their bodies.
But designing an enzyme that stops and breaks down cocaine was no easy task. The drug acts on multiple targets at the same time, both in the body and in the brain, and so the new molecules had to be custom-tailored for the job. The other side of the problem is that the drug tends to form a number of highly-toxic byproducts, including norcocaine and cocaethylene. These chemicals oftentimes have more serious effects that cocaine itself, and the new enzyme had to address them too. The enzyme was produced by scientists from the Columbia University and the University of Kentucky, who were led by a team of experts from the University of Michigan. Researcher Remy L. Brim from UM was the lead investigator.
The main issue with CocE (cocaine esterase) is that it's thermally unstable in the 37-degree Celsius environment of the human body. In order to get past this limitation, the group approached the issue from both a practical and a theoretical perspective. Using various biochemical techniques, as well as computer algorithms, they eventually managed to address the instability. The enzyme was originally derived from a species of soil bacterium naturally found around the roots of coca plants.