| On the Friday before Labor Day weekend 2021, Ronan Jeannotte watched a high school football scrimmage with his friends after school. Then the 17-year-old joined his parents and younger sister for dinner at their family's lake house in northern Massachusetts. His mom, Allison Jeannotte, recalls having a playful food fight at dinner, then tucking Ronan into bed. When she peeked in to check on him Saturday morning, he was dead. Exactly what he took that night isn't clear. But weeks later, a toxicology report arrived in the mail. Ronan had overdosed on fentanyl. Two months after his death, police in the outer Boston suburb of Maynard, Massachusetts, where the family lived issued a statement warning about fentanyl-laced marijuana products. My colleague Lizette Chapman and I met Allison over Zoom while reporting on a story in the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek about a long shot effort to make a fentanyl vaccine. Fentanyl is cheap and roughly 100 times stronger than morphine. It's often added to other drugs, including cocaine and synthetic cannabis, to make them more powerful. Nearly 75,000 people in the US died last year from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even a tiny amount can be deadly. JR Rahn, co-founder of the startup Ovax Inc. that is featured in our Businessweek story, is on a mission to stop those overdoses from happening. The company is working with researchers from top universities on fentanyl vaccines that can be used in advance by those at high risk. The company's lead product has been successfully tested in the lab, and human trials are planned for early next year. Another company, Cessation Therapeutics, has already begun trials on an anti-fentanyl monoclonal antibody. An initial safety trial was successful. If the therapy is found to be effective, the company could seek FDA approval in a couple of years. A fentanyl vaccine or a similar preventative antibody therapy might have helped Ronan had either existed in the summer of 2021. An aspiring music producer and guitarist, the teenager was a popular figure at Maynard High School, where he was starting his senior year. He practiced hours a day and planned to move to Los Angeles for a shot at fame after he graduated. He also suffered from a serious cannabis problem, and received treatment for it at an adolescent addiction program at Boston Children's Hospital. "It could have prevented this horrible tragedy" if a vaccine had existed at the time, says Allison, who started a charity with her husband aimed at helping high school seniors seeking careers without a college degree. "It would have been a no-brainer." If Ovax succeeds, "we would vaccinate ourselves and our daughter immediately." — Robert Langreth | 
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