Early Experiments Show Fast-Acting Antidote Targets Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

The first experiences show rapid -action antidote targets

By Sara Novak Edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

Carbon monoxide is a calm murder. Index and colorless, it has a unique capacity to hung the body of oxygen: it acts quickly, accumulating in the blood circulation and attaching to hemoglobin instead of oxygen. When oxygen cannot be fixed, red blood cells do not transport it around the body, effectively stifling the organs.

This gas, a common by-product of incomplete fuel combustion, causes 50,000 to 100,000 emergency visits and 1,500 deaths in the United States each year. The typical treatment uses an oxygen mask or a hyperbaric chamber to overwhelm the body with oxygen, pushing carbon monoxide molecules out of the hemoglobin cells so that oxygen can be fixed instead. It is effective, but it is slow – and even if only a small percentage of people with carbon monoxide poisoning, survivors often find themselves with brain lesions, cardiac complications or kidney and liver problems from oxygen deprivation.

But new research suggests a faster antidote. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA Documents newly modified protein therapy called RCOM-HBD-CCC; Given intravenously to the mice, it turned out to hang on carbon monoxide (CO) and expel the poison via the kidneys in a few minutes.

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“We want a treatment that you can give in the field,” explains the author of the study Mark T. Gladwin, dean of the Medicine School of the University of Maryland. He says that RCOM-HBD-CCC could be injected into people on the way to the hospital in an ambulance or to people with low oxygen levels on the fire site.

“This molecule becomes co-linely as soon as you inject it,” explains the co-author of the study and researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus Tejero. Because it has a much higher affinity for carbon monoxide than carbon monoxide owes hemoglobin, RCOM-HBD-CCC quickly sponges toxin. In addition to the study of the mouse, the researchers also confirmed that the protein quickly clung to carbon monoxide in human blood in test tubes.

Lance B. Becker, Medicine researcher in emergency medicine at Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine by Hofstra / Northwell, which was not involved in the study, notes that the new protein binds carbon monoxide – but not to nitric oxide, a gas molecule that plays a key role in the relaxation of the blood vessels blood. Gladwin and his team had previously designed a protein with affinity with carbon monoxide, but it is also linked to nitric oxide, causing problematic stiffness of the artery in the first mouse tests.

Becker hopes that this treatment will prove to be effective in planned studies with larger animals and possibly in human trials, which are probably for a few years of leave. Although researchers do not know if it works in human bodies before trying it, Becker is optimistic. “It’s a very intelligent little molecule if it takes place,” he says. “

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