WASHINGTON — Japan’s nuclear emergency highlights a big medical gap: Few treatments exist to help people exposed to large amounts of radiation.
Some possibilities are in the pipeline — development of drugs to treat radiation poisoning, and the first rapid tests to tell who in a panicked crowd would really need them.
The U.S. calls these potential products “countermeasures,” and they are part of the nation’s preparations against a terrorist attack, such as a dirty bomb. But if they work, they could be useful in any kind of radiation emergency.
“Thinking of terrorist events is what drives us. Mother Nature can be much of a terror, too,” said Dr. Robin Robinson, who heads the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, that funds late-stage research of products the government deems most likely to pan out.
BARDA has invested $164 million for research into anti-radiation treatment candidates since 2008, and $44 million for radiation testing — in hopes of adding such products to the nation’s emergency medical stockpile soon. That is in addition to research dollars from the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Department.
Among the radiation projects considered farthest along in development:
• Rapid tests that could spot dangerous radiation doses with mere finger-pricks of blood. A prototype machine sits at New York’s Columbia University that could check thousands of people.
• Some drugs used to help cancer patients boost their infection-fighting blood cells, sold under such names as Neupogen. They might do the same thing for radiation victims.
• An injection that saved monkeys from highly lethal beams. It seems to protect the body’s two most radiation-sensitive spots, the bone marrow and lining of the gut.
Today, there are only a few proven therapies for radiation injuries. Good supportive care — lots of fluids, infusions of blood-clotting platelets, and infection-fighting antibiotics — is key for acute radiation syndrome, an overall poisoning that can begin causing symptoms days to weeks after a super-high exposure.
“There isn’t going to be a simple solution to any of this,” said Dr. Nelson Chao of Duke University’s countermeasures program, who also is co-chairman of the Radiation Injury Treatment Network. “There will be a lot of little steps to address the plethora of toxicities that come from radiation.”
