Posted on 04/10/2008 3:31:15 PM PDT by Flavius
WASHINGTON - Scientists mimicked one of cancer's sneaky tricks to create a drug that promises to prevent a serious side effect of cancer treatment — radiation damage — or offer an antidote during a nuclear emergency.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
“I am Legend”
That’s interesting!
Uh oh, the anti-cell phone alarmists are not going to like this one bit........
The observations suggest a judgment that 4.5 Gy (450 rad) absorbed dose in the bone marrow for energetic and therefore penetrating gamma rays giving reasonably uniform irradiation of the marrow could be regarded as the LD50 in circumstances where those irradiated were protected from thermal radiation and blast damage and from neutrons and beta rays.
(Cue Black Sabbath - War Dogs)
For a discussion of the whole "Gy" thing, see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout
A dose of 5.3 Gy to 8.3 Gy is considered lethal but not immediately incapacitating. Personnel exposed to this amount of radiation will have their performance degraded within 2 to 3 hours, depending on how physically demanding the tasks they must perform are, and will remain in this disabled state at least 2 days.
However, at that point they will experience a recovery period and be effective at performing non-demanding tasks for about 6 days, after which they will relapse for about 4 weeks. At this time they will begin exhibiting symptoms of radiation poisoning of sufficient severity to render them totally ineffective.
Death follows at approximately 6 weeks after exposure, although results may vary.
The drug has no effect on other dangers, radioactive Iodine 141 for example....but is good news.
One question -- will this lead to iatrogenic spread of smaller tumors (in the GI and marrow) where the drug stops the apoptosis of other tumors the body *would* have caught?
Cheers!
If you don't mind answering me, can you access the abstract, or do you you have to register?
On primate studies,
no evidence of increased carcinogenesis has been seen
Rhesus monkeys were irradiated with 6.5 Gy of total body irradiation and injected intramuscularly with either a single dose of Protectan cblb502 or a placebo, one hour after irradiation. No supportive therapy was applied. The animals were observed for 40 days. cblb502 enabled survival of 70% of the animals in the protected group, versus the control group, in which 20% of the animals survived. In addition, gross pathology results showed that the majority of control animals displayed severe damage to the GI tract, while the cblb502 treated animals did not. This data demonstrates cblb502’s capacity as a mitigator of gastrointestinal radiation-induced injury.
Dr. Gudkov commented, “The level of protection observed in this study is very impressive and we are gratified to see that it is as high as the level achieved when Protectan cblb502 is administrated one hour prior to irradiation. This confirms our previously achieved results in mitigation of radiation damage in rodents. cblb502 is the first compound to provide protection from both gastrointestinal and hematopoietic radiation-induced damage when administrated before or after irradiation
I don't know. Let me know if you can access this link. I only read the last page of the text, page 4.
Telomeres, Telomerase, and Tumorigenesis -- A Review
I can FReepmail it otherwise.
Wife is a Downwinder, has a bum thyroid due to this “short lived product”. So do her brothers & sisters.
Thanks!
One question -- will this lead to iatrogenic spread of smaller tumors (in the GI and marrow) where the drug stops the apoptosis of other tumors the body *would* have caught?
Dang, g_w, that was exactly the question I wanted to ask...
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