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Comments: 385 +- Science: Cure For Radiation Sickness Found? on Friday July 17 2009, @08:38AM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday July 17 2009, @08:38AM
from the since-my-fallout-with-you dept.
from the since-my-fallout-with-you dept.
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medicine
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science
Summit writes "A scientist has claimed to have discovered a radioprotectant that all but eliminates acute radiation sickness even in cases of lethal doses of radiation in tests on rats and monkeys, when injected up to 72 hours after exposure. They also claim the drug, a protein, has no observed negative effects in humans. They have not irradiated any people just yet, but if this turns out to be true, it could mean everything from curing cancer to making manned interplanetary space expeditions feasible... not to mention treatment for radiation exposures in nuclear/radiological accidents/attacks. If this drug works, it would mean a true breakthrough as past experiments with radioprotectants were not particularly promising in any respect." The only source for the story at this time is an exclusive in YNet News, a site with the subtitle "Israel At Your Fingertips." Such a radioprotectant would be huge news for Israel. Make of it what you will.
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OMG! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OMG! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:OMG! (Score:4, Funny)
Don't forget the human flesh some ghouls carry. +25 HP but only +2 radiation! SCORE!
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This is actually bad news... (Score:4, Insightful)
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And better still, increases acceptance of N power (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider this - with an effective "cure" for radiation, it ceases to become a bogeyman and people will be a LOT more comfortable with clean, efficient nuclear power stations nearby. It takes out a large leg from the alarmists that try to stop them from being built.
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YNet isn't the only one who's picked it up.. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the BBC has a less slanted article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7341336.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:YNet isn't the only one who's picked it up.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice to see a second source.
I was puzzled when I first read, "They also claim the drug, a protein, has no observed negative effects in humans. They have not irradiated any people just yet..." but now, it seems they make the claim of no negative effects without any radiation. While nice, that doesn't precisely predict no negative effects WITH radiation.
I'm always a little skeptical when a medical announcement is made by a corporation.
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Re:YNet isn't the only one who's picked it up.. (Score:4, Insightful)
They mean that the substance itself does not cause any observed harm. In the approval of any medicine, the first step is always to demonstrate that the substance is not itself poisonous. Only then do trials progress to determine if it is in fact effective.
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Re:YNet isn't the only one who's picked it up.. (Score:5, Informative)
Ynet is Israel's top news site, owned by the most popular newspaper, Yedioth Achronoth (don't you love it when Hebrew names sound like mythical monsters?).
The story is on the front page of the paper today as well. I can vouch for the site and newspaper's credibility (I actually worked there many many years ago), but not for this story.
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Re:YNet isn't the only one who's picked it up.. (Score:5, Funny)
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American? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that but I would imagine that it is somewhat insulting to Americans - are they really that ashamed of being a US citizen that they have to somehow dilute it by mentioning where their family emmigrated from?
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Better Article & 2008 Shareholder Report (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Better Article & 2008 Shareholder Report (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Better Article & 2008 Shareholder Report (Score:5, Interesting)
In comparison, a full-body CT scan is about 0.01 Gy, anywhere from 12-100 Gy is typically used for antimicrobial irradiation, depending on the material and microorganisms of interest, and 5000 Gy is about the threshold where Deinococcus radiodurans starts to get bothered by ionizing radiation.
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I doubt it... (Score:4, Insightful)
No publication in a real scientific or medical journal.
Further, radiation sickness is difficult to fix. You've got alpha, beta & gamma particles bombarding cells, causing damage all over the place. Chemical bonds are broken, energy is added, and new chemical bonds form.
I really doubt a magic bullet can exist for the many types of cellular damage that can occur in different body systems.
Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Informative)
It's published in Science according to the BBC [bbc.co.uk]. Jokes about tabloids aside, Science is a real scientific journal.
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently the only side-effect are that it susceptible to turning into an airborne virus and it turns you into a rabid vampire-like creature that is sensitive to sunlight and likes to feed on humans. :-(
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Interesting)
No it won't. The damaged is caused by radiation which destroys DNA. Radioactive particles that are helium or larger are stopped by your skin. Smaller particles ionize organic molecules within your body producing highly reactive radicals. Maybe its these radicals you call energetic particles? Anyway even if you remove them the DNA damage from the radiation is still there, and often the extent of the radical damage is beyond the coping mechanism of the cell. Acute damage is in the radiation, radical damage is the slow damage of aging.
Like the GP said, the methods of radiation damage are diverse, it is impossible for there to exist a single pill that treats it from all these aspects. The pill would need to be a cluster of several different types of DNA repair enzymes (to repair DNA damage from all the possible ways of bond damage), as well as being an antioxidant (to absorb radicals) and some sort of protein 'digestant' (to remove the denatured proteins). Since the body took 3+ billion years to come up a couple dozen enzymes to fulfill these purposes, it seem unlikely (downright impossible!) that a single molecule could be created to take their place.
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Informative)
So far, animal tests do not appear to show an increase in cancer, which would be a big concern with damaged DNA + free radicals floating around. Obviously, at this point there are no studies on whether this presents a long-term cancer risk, but since one of the applications for this protein would actually be in the treatment of cancer, I imagine that study will be underway soon.
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Apoptosis did not evolve to combat massive doses of radiation. It's sort of a "blunt instrument", which takes out a lot of healthy tissue. Controlling apoptosis may very well allow recovery from radiation exposure. Perhaps there will be an increased cancer risk, but this is better than immediate death.
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apoptosis does not occur randomly. You must trigger it. In this case, with ionizing radiation-induced DNA damage, you have MMR proteins and the ATM/ATR system signaling to activate p53-dependent apoptosis. Since there are a number of checkpoints along the way, the cell that proceeds to apoptosis has already failed the evolutionarily-conserved tests for genome integrity and capability to repair its DNA damage.
It's is not feasible, given our knowledge of molecular biology, to prevent apoptosis after massive radiation exposure, without virtually guaranteeing a relatively quick (on the order of weeks to months) death from resultant tumors. The cell death mechanisms are there for a reason.
P.S. If you think dying from multiple foci of aggressive invasive lymphomas over a period of a couple of months is less painful than dying of massive GI epithelial and hematopoietic failure due to radiation sickness over a period of one week or less, then you haven't seen many cancer patients.
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that apoptosis on a massive scale can outrun the body's ability to repair itself, thus taking down the whole system. Using a drug to limit apoptosis should slow this process down and let the body properly heal. Presumably, cells that are "marked to die" will still ultimately die as the drug is withdrawn - just not all at once.
The researchers agree that cancer is a risk - but they report not having seen any in the lab animals thus far.
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Interesting)
it will just prolong their life and alter the proximal cause of death from radiation sickness to (most likely) a flood of lymphomas.
Assuming they aren't lying about their animal models, this is not the case, nor would one expect it to be.
Apoptosis is a programmed response to generic cellular damage (amongst other things.)
We evolved in a low radiation environment, so there was no selection for more clever apoptosis triggers than, "lots of damage, time to die!" Because such a mechanism would only kill off a cell needlessly now and then, it posed no risk. It was, like so many evolved solutions to problems, good enough.
Unfortunately this generic and rather indiscriminate mechanism is not appropriate to the rare and artificial case of high radiation exposure, in which many cells sustain lots of damage, but most of it reparable. Under these circumstances, turning off apoptosis and letting the expensive machinery of cellular and genetic repair do its thing is more desirable.
It is still likely that there is an elevated long-term risk of cancer comparable to that from high non-lethal doses, but since the usual mechanism of apoptosis will turn back on as the drug clears the system, most of the irreparable cells will off themselves at that time.
Overall, I am cautiously optimistic about this.
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Informative)
If you dig around a bit, you'll find that this compound doesn't fix damage done by radiation - rather it prevents the body from killing off the damaged cells, thus preventing radiation sickness. The makers speculate that it will increase cancer risk, but they so far have not observed this in lab animals.
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Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Interesting)
... this compound doesn't fix damage done by radiation - rather it prevents the body from killing off the damaged cells, thus preventing radiation sickness. The makers speculate that it will increase cancer risk, but they so far have not observed this in lab animals.
And that seems about right. (Actually it prevents the cells that are damaged from killing THEMSELVES off.)
After an intense dose of ionizing radiation there's a lot of broken stuff hanging around in a cell. Some of this triggers the suicide mechanism. But if the DNA isn't damaged (or isn't damaged in a significant and non-repairable way) by the radiation or the subsequent debris, it can typically recover (if it doesn't "slit its own wrists").
Cell suicide for local damage, to prevent possible cancer from mutated cells, is an appropriate response. But suicide of the bulk of the cells kills the person, when surviving with a somewhat higher cancer risk later is not.
So it seems to me that a drug that temporarily suppresses the mechanism, used to let the body survive a radiation exposure event that would otherwise kill it, is indeed likely to result in a living subject with a somewhat higher cancer risk.
But as I recall the released studies on cancer risks among survivors of single high-dose radiation events - like nuclear lab accidents and Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors - indicated a very small increase in cancer risk. So not seeing a significant bump in cancer rates among a small sample of lab animals in preliminary tests is hardly surprising.
So the claims seem plausible to me.
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72 hours after exposure? (Score:4, Interesting)
So this can patch you DNA back together after it's been ripped to shreds?
Pardon me, but I'm a bit sceptical.
Re:72 hours after exposure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than take the chance that the repairs that get done will leave the cell cancerous, the cell is programmed to suicide. Another cell will take it's place. But in the case of fatal radiation poisoning, this happens to too many cells at once.
'Unacceptable risk' that a cell might turn cancerous might be a very low risk indeed, since cancer is fatal 'in the wild'. Most radiation damaged cells might very well be able to repair themselves perfectly if only they didn't suicide. Deactivating the suicide mechanism temporarily gives them time to repair themselves. Once repaired, they no longer want to suicide. However in the case where many cells were radiation damaged, this likely means some cells were repaired incorrectly and will now cause cancer. Maybe this is not as likely as it may seem at first? How well does radiation cause cancer? How exactly does it happen? I've heard that a speck of plutonium inhaled has a 100% chance of causing lung cancer. But that speck is emmitting radiation 24x7 killing and damaging neighboring cells all the time. Is it the nuclear damage to the cells that causes the cancer, or is it the constant healing? Doesn't the body send stem cells to repair damaged areas? Aren't stem cells more cancer prone?
Maybe in the case of radiation poisoning, the cells are damaged, and if prevented from suiciding, they will be fine. This isn't chronic radiation damage caused by contamination, but rather acute radiation poisoning caused by having rads of radiation shined through you.
Maybe not. Excessive X-Ray photographs cause cancer don't they? Maybe the irradiated mice and monkeys will be teeming with tumors in short order. Maybe some of them will touch their keepers and pick up some genetic material. Then they will mutate to be more humanlike, including having intelligence, and natural talent at karate. They will go live in the sewers and protect us from evil ninja gangs with their elite Kung Fu skillz.
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Re:72 hours after exposure? (Score:5, Informative)
Err .. no. It can ionize targets as long as it has sufficient energy to do so. Never seen a cloud chamber?
The secondary electrons it creates, and the secondary chemical species those create, do the damage.
I doubt that any of those molecules (H2O2, mostly) survive for more than a few minutes before doing damage to something that may or may no be important.
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Re:72 hours after exposure? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, that was a stupid thing to say, given I know fine that it generates secondary species all along its path. My main gist is that there's an easy mental image of ionising radiation striking a DNA molecule and damaging it, which isn't the correct mechanism at all. The correct thing to say is that it can only ionise the DNA if it encouters it, whereas the secondary species effectively give it a larger cross-section. Secondary species are exteremely important to DNA damage. Their lifetimes aren't particularly large but they're monumental compared to the time the original radiation spends in the body.
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That's silly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's silly (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh good, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh good, (Score:5, Insightful)
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BG? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that the stuff Helo kept shooting up while he was stranded on Caprica?
it stops apoptosis (Score:5, Informative)
It works by inhibiting the protein that initiates the cell suicide programme
In other word it does not repair radiation damage (cue the rad away joke), it just stops all the cells where this protein is present to die. Whether there was a good reason for them to die or not. It might be wonderful for radiation treatment, though. The researcher seems conscient of the risk (like new cancer developping).
Re:it stops apoptosis (Score:4, Informative)
The researchers theorize an increased cancer risk as a possibility as well.
Since they've been unable to observe such increased risk in testing so far, I think your claim of a "significant" increase in risk is premature, and your labeling of the substance as a carcinogen is FUD.
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Fallout (Score:4, Insightful)
Known work, but may be making progress (Score:5, Informative)
First, this isn't new; the company issued a press release on PR Newswire in January 2007.
It has nothing to do with Israel; the work is being done at Cleveland BioLabs in Cleveland, Ohio. [cbiolabs.com] The researcher behind this, Andrei Gudkov [cbiolabs.com], is Russian. He was at the National Cancer Research Center in Moscow until 1990, then came to the US and became a professor at the University of Illinois.
This seems to be legitimate; they're in FDA Phase I human testing (safety only, not effectiveness.). That doesn't mean it will work; if it makes it through Phase II, it's real.
cells have anti-radiation mechanisms (Score:4, Interesting)
The second inducement was the incorporation of mitochrondria into eucharyote cells. This gave cells ten times the energy they had before to eventually power animal locomotion. However, mitochrondria spew out all kinds of nasty poisons like free oxygen, protons, and high electric fields. Cells had to develop mechanisms to neutralize these.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, no! Now you need it more than ever, because they're not afraid of accidentally irradiating your brain while they read your thoughts!
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Re:I need a car analogy... (Score:4, Insightful)
And possibly make the treatment quite ineffective, if it also works on cancer cells.
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Re:I need a car analogy... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I need a car analogy... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it would be an effective way to treat cancer. That's why it's being developed.
No, it doesn't affect the cancer cells, too.
In the studies, the potential to actually cause cancer is being investigated. In testing so far, it hasn't happened.
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Re:I need a car analogy... (Score:5, Funny)
God kills kitten everytime you RTFA
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Re:I need a car analogy... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you already have cancer, then developing another type of it one or two decades down the road is the least of your worries.
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Re:Won't fix DNA damage (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Just In Time For : (Score:5, Insightful)
Why post anonymous troll... don't have any confidence in your assertions? Don't want to have your karma blasted?
North Korea is like an ugly step-child who will take every opportunity to get back at his more attractive more successful siblings. That kid nobody likes because they always lie about everything and don't take care of themselves, don't try to get along and are generally miserable and make everyone around them miserable.
Israel is like a self-centered only child who gets all the attention deserved or not and always expects that she gets to go first. The kids she cut in front of long ago despise her but everyone else just takes pity on her as an only child and invite her to their parties to be nice. Sometimes she helps out, if it's in her own interest and then everyone gives her a high five to encourage her to do more for others and be less self-centered...
Two completely different psychologies that can present themselves in similar ways at times... both are isolated in a way and feel threatened by those around them, so they both feel the need to create and put forward a strong defensive front and both over-react when anyone questions them about it. Otherwise, completely different.
Now let's get back on topic.
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Re:Suicidal cells (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of radiation poisoning, the problem is that so many cells die, that you die. If you can prevent them all dying, you can maybe handle the cancer issues from cells that were damaged such that they've become precancerous, later.
The other thing that's interesting about this, to me, is that there are indications that people who have had heart attacks or hypothermia don't die from those, but from a massive wave of programmed cell death as a result of, essentially, misinterpreting the results of the heart attack/hypothermia: big fluctuations in oxygen levels and ion concentrations [scripps.edu], that make the cells all think they're individually damaged and cause them to die en masse. If this could be used to stop that process, it could save millions of lives every year, not just the very few people who have radiation poisoning.
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Re:kdawson strikes again (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were published in Science, yeah you'd probably get slashdotted.
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