Feeling stressed? There may soon be a vaccine to help calm your nerves.
California scientists are working on a stress vaccine that would help people relax without actually slowing them down, the Daily Mail reported.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, has been researching the vaccine for 30 years and believes he can alter the brain’s chemistry to create a more "focused calm."
Sapolsky is working on the body’s hormones known as glucocorticoids, which are a part of the immune system, and the body produces too many of these when it becomes stressed. That is one reason why we can become sick when we are stressed.
Sapolsky and his team tailored a herpes virus to carry engineered "neuro-protective" genes into the brain to counteract the rogue hormones before they can harm the brain. The virus has been proven to work on rats, but human trials still need to be carried out.
"To be honest, I’m still amazed that it works," Sapolsky recently told Wired magazine.
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