Ok, I like this news given the times we live in, with nuclear power plants like Fukushima Daiichi in Japan having melt-downs, the possibility of radiation poisoning is becoming an issue of modern living. So I was happy to learn that researchers at Berkeley Lab have invented a pill that might be able to decontaminate people exposed to radioactive actinides from a nuclear reactor accident or by other means.
The pill has already passed the initial pre-clinical phase and now awaits the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to determine what further data is needed to move into clinical trials.
The Berkeley Lab treatment can be administered orally in the form of a pill, a necessity for prompt treatment in the event of mass contamination. Depending on the level of radiation exposure and how soon treatment can start, one of these pills would result in the excretion of approximately 90-percent of the actinide contaminants within 24 hours. Taking one pill daily for two weeks should be enough to remove virtually all of the actinide contaminants.
The research at Berkeley Lab began more than two decades ago under the leadership of Chemist Ken Raymond and the late Patricia Durbin. The primary goal of the project has been to identify sequestering agents that can encapsulate actinides into tightly bound cage-like chemical complexes for transport out of the body. Read the Full Press Release
Illustration Courtesy of Zosia Rostomian, Berkeley Lab: This octadentate HOPO is a sequestering agent that can encapsulate actinides, such as this plutonium atom (gold), into tightly bound cage-like complexes for excretion out of the body.