Andrei Gudkov of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute published a study in the scientific journal Science showing how they created a drug that may prevent the serious side effect of radiation damage during cancer treatments. It may also work as an antidote during a nuclear emergency.
A single dose of the drug named CBLB502 protected mice and monkeys from a radiation dose that normally would have been fatal.
Radiation is a normal tool used to combat cancers but healthy tissues are sensitive to it, particularly bone marrow and the gastrointestinal tract, and therefore the amount of radiation during treatment must be limited.
According to Gudkov the radiation does not kill healthy cells in the same way it kills cancer cells. Instead marrow and the GI cells overreact and "commit suicide" a process known as apoptosis. Apoptosis is the body's natural way of destroying defective cells. The research attempted to replicate the process by activating the same pathway in healthy cells to attempt to keep radiation-blasted cells from triggering the apoptosis. Knowing that a proteen from normal gut bacteria called flagellin can wake up a normally dormant cell-signaling pathway, known as "nuclear factor-KappaB" the researchers created a drug based on the protein.
The research found that mice and monkeys that had been injected with the drug prior to lethal full-body doses of radiation dramatically improved the animal's survival rate.
[Source: YahooNews]
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