Scientists Make Mice Immune to Radiation

http://www.dotmed.com/news/story/10571/

by miles • 15 years ago

34 27 15 years ago

miles3• 15 years ago

FTA: In mice, when Dr. Isenberg and his team introduced a drug that prevented a protein, thrombospondin-1, from binding to a surface cell receptor called CD47, the animals could endure almost unheard-of doses of radiation with virtually no ill effects.

This is from late 2009. Does anyone have an update on this research? Would obviously be a great boon if it was equally effective in humans.

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

http://www.radiationcontroltherapies.com/news-and-updates.ht...

miles3• 15 years ago

Very cool - thanks! Looks like the latest update is that "The CCR-NCI of the NIH recently recognized the work of Dr. Isenberg and collaborators in controlling radiation by CD47 blockade as one of the 'top science advances for 2010'". Nice to hear that the work is apparently regarded as credible. Hope to hear more about it soon!

biot2• 15 years ago

It would be ironic if this therapy causes increased risk of cancer, for which chemotherapy then has little effect. Then again, if the resistance is temporary I imagine some workers in Fukushima might benefit from this once it's been demonstrated safe enough.

kajecounterhack• 15 years ago

Go to the second page

"Perhaps equally exciting, Dr. Isenberg and his team found that while his technique protected healthy cells from damage, it actually increased the effectiveness of radiation treatments on cancer cells."

rbanffy• 15 years ago

"safe enough" as in "safer than standard treatment". In their place, I'd prefer a taste for cheese and an overwhelming fear of cats to radiation sickness.

GrandMasterBirt• 15 years ago

Chemotherapy is not rad therapy. Diff methods, both pretty effective in hurting healthy cells.

masklinn• 15 years ago

So coppelions are real?

Tichy2• 15 years ago

How am I supposed to mutate into a superhero if radiation has no effect?

crm114• 15 years ago

There's always lab explosions and alien/mystical rings.

reitzensteinm2• 15 years ago

I know you're joking, but from what Udo is saying, it seems like this is stopping the body from killing off corrupted cells. So if anything, this would actually be a step closer to super hero mutation.

flipbrad2• 15 years ago

Not really. It's a step closer to randomly dispersed neoplasia/tumours popping up around your body!

step closer to have super hero mutant children, perhaps, if it's keeping your gonads alive but mutant.

possibilistic2• 15 years ago

I don't really buy this. There's simply no way that messing with the NO pathway can prevent DNA degradation resulting from radiation exposure. I'm not familiar with irradiation units and how they correlate to DNA damage, but all amounts are harmful to the molecule. Ionizing radiation damage can be fixed via repair pathways, but it's simply a function of probability as to when this machinery fails in a critical location.

The paper might be interesting to read, though, especially if it got cited. As always, news articles tend to inflate claims and miss the point entirely.

Joakal• 15 years ago

Look to nature surviving so well in Chernobyl?

smackay• 15 years ago

Nature is doing so well around Chernobyl because of the lack of humans. I don't have a reference to hand but I beleive that the birds in the area have a high rate of genetic defects and low reproductive success. That fact that the environment seems to be doing well is a statement of how much impact humans have on their surroundings.

Tichy2• 15 years ago

Nature adapts - it might counter with more births and shorter life spans, or whatever. Just because cockroaches prosper doesn't mean humans would.

possibilistic2• 15 years ago

I doubt "nature" and humans utilize the same repair processes. There are also a wide variety of reproduction strategies that minimize the requirement for long lasting information integrity in any single individual.

It'd be incredibly interesting to look for changes in the repair mechanisms of these organisms--especially the promoters. I bet they're being expressed at ridiculously high levels.

T-R• 15 years ago

I didn't get the impression that the article was implying that DNA damage and other stochastic effects are prevented, but that maybe the initial effects of radiation poisoning are avoided, and that (maybe because of this) cells are more able to repair themselves.

That said, I can't disagree with your last point - it's probably at least a little embellished.

flipbrad2• 15 years ago

Don't presume that it's just DNA degradation per se that gives rise to tumorigenic cells. (Mis)repair can be a key cause of cancer.

bedris2• 15 years ago

Here is the original Sci Transl Med (2008) paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2811586/?tool=pu...

And here is a follow-up paper in Am J Pathol (2008): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2543077/?tool=pu...

Both are freely available at the links provided.

Udo2• 15 years ago

As has become standard in science articles, this one too is highly sensationalistic and potentially misleading.

NO is, in low doses, a signaling molecule used by the body to facilitate intercellular communication. Similarly to ischemic attacks (as in strokes), what follows acute radiation exposure is a massive disruption of normal cell operations. There are, to use a bit of programmer lingo here, "checksums" in place to detect these kinds of disruptions and to shut down affected cells immediately. This is essentially like a segmentation fault or any other kind of fatal exception, and it's called apoptosis.

During normal conditions, apoptosis signaling pathways are essential to weed out cells that aren't functioning properly. During massive crisis, however, this mechanism kills people, because it is suddenly triggered in a large amount of cells. That's what kills stroke and heart attack victims (if they survive the incident itself). The body simply doesn't know that in this case it would be life-saving if it kept corrupted cells alive.

A similar thing happens with acute radiation poisoning: cells die en masse, usually the mucosae are affected the worst, leading to massive shock and internal bleeding. This particular research apparently focuses on halting these apoptosis pathways, so the body doesn't self destruct.

Yes, that's essential. However, there is a price to pay that the article almost completely ignores. While interfering with the cell death signal saves you from immediate death, it does nothing to repair damaged porteins and DNA.

miles3• 15 years ago

As has become standard in strongly-upvoted HN posts, this one too is highly sensationalistic and potentially misleading.

I am genuinely sorry to be so snarky, but I am really tired of scientific-sounding arguments (like the "Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors" article) being automatically credited on this site.

"While interfering with the cell death signal saves you from immediate death, it does nothing to repair damaged porteins and DNA."

Did you bother to read the second page?

"Also, a bigger mystery is figuring out how, by blocking this pathway, cells are able to fix the damaged DNA within. Dr. Isenberg says they know that following radiation exposure, the DNA is scrambled, but somehow, with this treatment, the cells are able to get themselves right."

"'It's not that we're blocking radiation from hitting the tissue,' he says. 'Somehow...they repair themselves, and go about their business.'"

Udo2• 15 years ago

The article flat-out lies about achieving radiation immunity. Claims like these are extremely representative examples of misleading sensationalism. There is simply no room for discussion about the central point: the article is making statements that are provably wrong. After that come the smaller claims they make, several of which sound highly dubious to me, especially your favorite one here:

> "'It's not that we're blocking radiation from hitting the tissue,' he says. 'Somehow...they repair themselves, and go about their business.'"

I strongly suspect there is no data to support this statement. We have known about small-scale repairs for a few years now, but this statement goes far beyond that. With the radiation doses involved, this phenomenon would require the reconstruction of information that is quite simply lost from the genome. Of course it is possible that many of these cells "go about their business", but that's not the same as assuming they have somehow repaired themselves.

As far as being "automatically credited on this site" I think you should give the other users a little more credit, and perhaps tone down your blanket judgements a little at the same time. Just because I made a few "scientific-sounding arguments" doesn't mean I'm automatically wrong. The article claims immunity from radiation which is total gibberish. As far as the alleged complete self-repair goes, there are plenty of reasons to be extremely weary about this as well.

By the way, I think I made it clear in the original post how important research like this is. At the same time I believe it's even more important not to misrepresent findings.

Scientists Make Mice Immune to Radiation

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