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Anti-Radiation Drug
BravoFourEcho writes "The BBC has an article about a U.S. company that is producing a drug to mitigate some of the effects of radiation. Reminds me of Rad-X in the Fallout series of games."
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The American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending that parents and schools keep potassium iodine on hand, just in case.
Other than introducing competition into the marketplace we can't tell how important this is. Cancer patients as a result of their treatment have their white blood cell counts hit the floor and have been taking the drug Neupogen (as the company's website says). Neupogen (in my thankfully very limited second hand experience) works pretty well. A family member of mine taking the drug got a worried phonecall from the lab asking him if he was alright--his white blood cell count was something like 20x higher than a normal, healthy person. But to know how big of a deal HE2100 really is there would need to be a comparison of it to Neupogen, which the article and HollisEden's website don't offer.
Hollis-Eden was trying to shut-up its own unhappy investors (that criticized them on internet) in a nice Scientologist way. Their 2 lawsuits were just thrown out and they have to pay the other party lawyers.e .cfm?ID=87 6
http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/releas
Until very recently, they were running out of cash (less than 1 year on operating expences left in the bank) and nobody would lend them any more.
This is a very small company (50 people) in San Diego. They do not do discovery of their own drugs, they just licence them. Their clams to treat and even cure AIDS, malaria, lupus, cardiovascular ailments and radiation sickness!! And by using steroids, similar to common anabolics. Without knowing the exact mechanismus how their stuff work. No wonder a lot of people in the field does not want to deal with them!
Their self-promotion is aggresive, and until very recently they had not much to show for all their investors money. Their stock was hyped up and then collapsed several times, because of Barnum-like announcements.
But the strange thing is that their panacea drugs may actualy work. Their flagship drug candidate HE2200 - Androstenetriol (AET), metabolite of Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) - happens to protect animals if given before or immediately after radiation injury.
It seems like the wrong people got lucky. I hope they do not srew this up, because if they do, other companies may not take over their drugs, because of the patentability issues.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
They had radiation attacks, and had to take their medication when the alert sounded.
In order to properly deliver the medication to the lungs, they smoked these special cigarettes. Imagine, smoking cigarettes to prevent lung cancer. (or worse)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The BBC article seems to be nearly scientific content free... the company has a press release about this drug which at least gives some highlights of their animal tests. Now, does anybody know what the people at the British Society For Haematology meeting who saw the details thought of this?
It also occurs to me that if one was drowning, yelling "Help! I'm drowning and I lost my bikini top" would probably be m