New protein therapy shows promise as antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning

https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2025/new-protein-therapy-shows-promise-as-first-ever-antidote-for-carbon-monoxide-poisoning.html

by breve • 11 months ago

227 39 11 months ago

medschool.umaryland.edu

DonHopkins3• 11 months ago

New Protein Therapy Shows Promise as Antidote for Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

So Shatner was right all along: not only is Promise Margarine good for lowering your cholesterol level, but it can also treat carbon monoxide poisoning! And it tastes like butter, promise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wf717fKFE

majkinetor• 11 months ago

I don't see a relation of any kind and I hate commercials maybe more than anybody else, but it's always a good time for a funny one with Shatner :)

DonHopkins3• 11 months ago

Sheez, I can't believe I have to explain that Shatner shows Promise as antidote for high cholesterol too.

bananapub• 11 months ago

not very on topic, but for those who missed one of the more surreal reddit threads in history:

- [MA] Post-it notes left in apartment [0]

- and the update from OP a while later [1]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_post...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/49zfvb/what_is_t...

gus_massa• 11 months ago

It looks like he found a note in his room and see some strange thing in the window, and someone somehow says it's CO but it may be that the OP has unrelated hallucinations. Is this a symptom of CO poisoning? I think you only get sleepy, faint and die.

maxbond• 11 months ago

Chronic exposure can lead to memory loss, yes. You're describing the symptoms of acute exposure.

hinkley4• 11 months ago

CO exposure is accumulative. If you’re around an intense source of it you’re toast. But with a small point source or decent ventilation it kills you slower.

And your body produces new blood cells every day, so minor sources like wood smoke or burning a candle don’t dose you enough to be a problem, unless perhaps your day job is as an athlete.

phatskat2• 11 months ago

Reading in a bit more, the second post links to a comment thread where further down they talk about post-it notes.

The original thread about the post its had some updates along the lines of: someone in comments suggested OP get a CO detector. OP says “ya know, I have one. Maybe I should take it out of the box and plug it in.” Later OP said their detector rated the CO at 100ppm! They went to the hospital lol.

Last update I saw was four months after - OP was guessing their recovery would go on for another year, and there was likely some permanent damage but overall they felt confident at getting back to 80%, maybe even 99%.

dtgriscom• 11 months ago

How is this administered? Seems like a crucial detail to omit.

DonHopkins3• 11 months ago

You can spread it on bread, melt it over pancakes, rub it all over corn on the cob, put it in baked potatoes, etc, promise!

elric• 11 months ago

This has the potential to become a rapid, intravenous antidote for carbon monoxide

So intravenously, presumably.

searine• 11 months ago

This research was funded by multiple NIH grants, a Department of Defense grant, and the Martin Family Foundation.

jfarlow• 11 months ago

Here's the full sequence of the protein, found in the supplement [1]

KSSEPASVSAAERRAETEQHKLEQENPGIVWLDQHGRVTAENDVALQILGPAGEQSLGVAQDSLEGIDVVQLHPEKSRDKLRFLLQSKDVGGSPVKSPPPVAMMINIPDRILMIKVSSMIAAGGASGTSMIFYDVTDLTTEPSGLPAGGSAPSHHHHHH

It is a protein encoding the PxRcoM-1 heme binding domain with C94S mutation and a C-terminal 6xHis tag (RcoM-HBD-C94S)

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2501389122#supplementa...

sunrunner• 11 months ago

This looks like an puzzle input to a day from Advent of Code.

meisel• 11 months ago

Thanks for that sequence, I can really picture it now

dekhn3• 11 months ago

You can search for it here: https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/search/sequence/KSSEPASVSAAERRAE... and in principle get the AlphaFold predicted structure (I couldn't find an experimentally determined one). However, like nearly all EBI resources, the web server timed out before I could get a link to the prediction.

immibis• 11 months ago

Isn't it strange to see protein codes spreading the same way magnet links or AACS encryption keys might.

mhb• 11 months ago

That doesn't look right. I think the problem is in the last quarter. Exercise for the reader.

BurningFrog• 11 months ago

How hard is it to manufacture once you know the sequence?

kazinator3• 11 months ago

The existing methylene blue substance is also effective in cases of CO poisoning.

1933 paper:

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajplegacy.19...

"Methylene Blue as an Antidote to CO Poisoning", Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks

skadamou• 11 months ago

This paper is interesting but I want to point out there is a difference between a research paper showing that something is hypothetically feasible and something that is actually useful clinically.

Clinically, methylene blue is used to treat a different condition, methemeglobinemia and is not used to treat carbon monoxide poisoning which relies on hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

kazinator3• 11 months ago

The researcher used non-human animals; it worked on them.

The hypothetical part was only that it might also work on humans.

In any case, it seems the result was good enough as a clinical trial from the point of view of veterinary medicine, in regard to those specific types of animals.

hinkley4• 11 months ago

Infused in the bloodstream, scavenger hemoproteins like RcoM-HBD-CCC rapidly bind to carbon monoxide molecules, reducing the time it takes to clear half of the carbon monoxide in the blood to less than a minute, compared to more than hour with pure oxygen therapy and five hours without any treatment.

lawlessone• 11 months ago

I can see a market in selling this to urban cyclists..

I've seen people doing that get quite a bit of exhaust fumes to the face.

hinkley4• 11 months ago

Breath control is an underrated skill.

sandworm101• 11 months ago

CO poisioning is one of those strange cases treatable using scuba diving. Recompression therapy, which can be theoretically aped under water, can be like magic. In some cases the patient just wakes up like nothing is wrong. No drugs. No invasive treatment. Get deep enough and hemoglobin isnt totally necessary for getting O2 where it needs to be.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470531/

pfdietz3• 11 months ago

This looks like a therapy you can only get once in your life, after which it has acted like a vaccine and your immune system would react to it.

isk517• 11 months ago

If getting carbon monoxide poisoning once isn't enough to make you invest in a few detectors then I don't know what will

dekhn3• 11 months ago

Typically, protein therapeutics are "humanized" before being pushed through the drug approval process. Part of that is ensuring that the therapeutic isn't extremely likely to trigger an immune response. It's a nontrivial problem.

pfdietz3• 11 months ago

Those are usually antibodies, aren't they? This isn't an antibody.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanized_antibody

PaulHoule• 11 months ago

I guess CO kills you because it sticks to a protein (Hemoglobin), this is a protein that it binds even tighter to.

What I find hilarious though is that my RSS reader loves to show me articles about ways of turning the harmful gas CO2 into the useful gas CO, back when I was a kid it was the other way around!

New protein therapy shows promise as antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning

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