This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Quitting smoking is tough. So tough that only about 5% 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 couldn't beat a placebo in clinical trials.

But researchers haven't given up on a vaccine just 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?

Almost 50 years have been reports of bacteria that can actually use nicotine to thrive on.

Kim Jonda, 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 John Day 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. doped with a cigarette's worth of nicotine.

The enzyme was stable at human body temperature, and it 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 Jonda says the enzyme isn't ready for prime time just yet.

It's bacterial, so...

You're going to get an immune response, immune surveillance from it, so...

And right now, the other important half-life, that of the enzyme in serum, is only three days.

So it won't stick around long enough to be an effective vaccine.

A month would be great, you know, a week or two would also be probably reasonable.

While the researchers work out the kinks, smokers will have to rely on the tried and true methods of quitting,

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