July 20, 2009

Radiation Sickness Cures and Anti-radiation Pills

1. Dr. Andrei Gudkov has developed >medication that suppresses the "suicide mechanism" of cells hit by radiation, while enabling them to recover from the radiation-induced damages that prompted them to activate the suicide mechanism in the first place.




Technical information on the radiation sickness cure is here

The drug CBLB502 switches on teh genes TLR5 and NF-kB but it did not cause an excessive response from the immune system. It was also far less toxic than raw flagellin and mice could tolerate double the dose. The drug activated a parade of protective proteins that greatly reduced the levels of apoptosis in the vulnerable intestines of irradiated mice, and protected the stem cells in both their guts and their bloodstreams.

A single shot of CBLB502 at less than 1% of the maximum dose, 87% of mice managed to survive an otherwise lethal 13 Gray of radiation. The drug completely outclassed all known protective chemicals. Even the maximum possible dose of the second-best chemical - amifostine - only saved 54% of the irradiated mice.

The drug could be given to cancer patients who are being treated with radiation, to protect healthy cells from dying off. She treated tumour-bearing mice with three daily radiation doses of 4 Gray to mimic the regular treatments that cancer patients often go through. When mice were injected with simple saline solution, the accumulated damage killed them all but when the doses were pre-empted by injections of CBLB502, every one of the mice survived.

The celebrations would be short-lived however, if the drug defended tumour cells in a similar way. Fortunately, that wasn't the case and the tumours in protected mice succumbed to the radiotherapy as per usual. If anything, the addition of CBLB502 killed slightly more cancer cells than usual, which may be due to small immune boosts triggered by the compound's resemblance to flagellin.

Burdelya also saw to a final worry. Apoptosis exists for a reason, and there is a risk that protected cells could survive the effects of radiation but live with damage that will lead to cancer in the long run. With this in mind, Burdelya tested the drug on a strain of cancer-prone mice and found that after a burst of radiation, they did not develop tumours any quicker or more frequently than they normally would.

Abstract: An Agonist of Toll-Like Receptor 5 Has Radioprotective Activity in Mouse and Primate Models.

The drug CBLB502 seems to be far ahead of the next two treatments in terms of proven effectiveness and in terms of deployment. However, the next two work on different mechanisms and appear to be complimentary to the drug CBLB502. (You might take both. One to reduce free radicals that cause damage and the CBLB502 to switch genes prevent cell death.)


3. There are still no online results for Rice University's DARPA funded work on Nanovector Trojan Horses (NTH). These carbon nanotube based drugs scavenge free radicals and mitigate the biological affects that are induced through the initial ionizing radiation.



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