Latest news with #AmeyaKirtane
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Scientists Propose Injecting Astronauts With Tardigrade RNA After Finding It Prevents Radiation Damage
Scientists have discovered a wild treatment that they say could protect astronauts from the copious amounts of space radiation they'd be exposed to during trips into deep space. In an effort to find new ways to protect cancer patients from the many side effects of radiation therapy, a group of researchers found that a protein from tardigrades — tiny, practically indestructible "water bears" that have been known to survive the hostile vacuum of space — may be the answer. The protein was previously identified as helping tardigrades survive some of the most extreme conditions on Earth — and yes, even space. Now, a team led by Harvard Medical School instructor and MIT visiting scientist Ameya Kirtane used messenger RNA encoding to inject the protein into mice. As detailed in a paper published this week in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, the team found that their technique generated sufficient protein to protect the mice's DNA from radiation-induced damage. The same method, they hope, could eventually be used in human cancer patients. "Radiation can be very helpful for many tumors, but we also recognize that the side effects can be limiting," MIT associate professor of mechanical engineering Giovanni Traverso in a statement. "There's an unmet need with respect to helping patients mitigate the risk of damaging adjacent tissue." The side effects of radiation treatment can be brutal, from mouth sores to rectal bleeding. Scientists have come up with drugs that reduce this damage, but only to a degree. In search for a better option, the researchers drew inspiration from tardigrades and their incredible survival ability. A suppressor protein, dubbed Dsup, helps to protect the tardigrades' DNA from radiation-induced damage by binding to it. According to MIT, this protein allows the tiny creatures to survive doses 2,000 to 3,000 times higher than what humans can tolerate. By delivering this protein through messenger RNA encoding, the team found that the Dsup protein was expressed successfully in the colon and mouth tissues in mice, two areas that are susceptible to radiation-induced damage in human cancer patients. "One of the strengths of our approach is that we are using a messenger RNA, which just temporarily expresses the protein, so it's considered far safer than something like DNA, which may be incorporated into the cells' genome," Kirtane explained. Apart from helping cancer patients during radiation therapy, the researchers suggest it could also help patients receiving chemotherapy. It could even help astronauts from suffering radiation damage, since long voyages through space, such as a trip to Mars, would expose future space travelers to dangerous levels of cosmic radiation. "Another possible application would be to help prevent radiation damage in astronauts in space," MIT enthused in the statement. More on tardigrades: Scientists Propose Sending Small Creatures to Neighboring Star Systems
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Tardigrade Protein Could Soon Make Cancer Patients More Radiation Proof
When it comes to surviving radiation, tardigrades really know their stuff, shrugging off doses that would annihilate most other life forms. Now researchers are using this knowledge to find ways to protect healthy cells during cancer treatments. A team led by Ameya Kirtane from Harvard Medical School and Jianling Bi from the University of Iowa has isolated this superpower in the form of messenger RNA, which when injected into cells protects them from radiation. When people undergo radiotherapy for cancer, it's not just the tumor that suffers. The radiation causes DNA breaks in healthy cells, too, leading to massive cell death and inflammation, which is responsible for the treatment's unpleasant side-effects. "It can manifest as something as simple as mouth sores, which can limit a person's ability to eat because it's so painful, to requiring hospitalization because people are suffering so terribly from the pain, weight loss, or bleeding," University of Iowa radiation oncologist James Byrne says. Despite their cute monikers like moss piglet and water bear, the microscopic, eight-legged animals known as tardigrades are notoriously tough. Aside from surviving the hottest setting of your oven and pressures of 7.5 Gpa, they can handle around a thousand times the dose of ionizing radiation that would kill a human. They can do this because of their ability to produce a unique protein Dsup (short for 'damage suppressing'), which helps them tolerate both the initial blast and the hydroxyl radicals that form in cells as a result, which would otherwise tear up one or even both strands of DNA. Scientists have had their eyes on this protein as a potential aid to cancer treatment since it was discovered in 2016, and now they're one step closer. That 2016 study showed that when expressed in human cells, Dsup reduces X-ray-induced DNA damage by about 40 percent, which is why the researchers are hopeful it could protect cancer patients from the serious side-effects of their treatment. But Dsup has to be inside a cell's nucleus to work. Delivering this protein directly into each cell is not feasible, and integrating the genes for Dsup directly into DNA has its own risks. "One of the strengths of our approach is that we are using a messenger RNA, which just temporarily expresses the protein, so it's considered far safer than something like DNA, which may be incorporated into the cells' genome," Kirtane says. By wrapping the mRNA in specific polymer-lipid nanoparticles (one design best-suited to the colon, and one ideal for the mouth) they were able to smuggle the strands into lab-grown cells where they were used to generate large amounts of Dsup before disintegrating. "We thought that perhaps by combining these two systems – polymers and lipids – we may be able to get the best of both worlds and get highly potent RNA delivery. And that's essentially what we saw," Kirtane says. Importantly, delivering the Dsup in mRNA 'recipe' format also prevents the protective tardigrade armor from sneaking their way into cells the radiation is supposed to kill, such as those making up the tumor. To make sure this works in action, the team injected Dsup-encoding mRNA into mice who, 6 hours later, received a dose of radiation roughly equivalent to one that might be administered to a human cancer patient. One group of mice received mRNA treatment and radiation to the mouth; the other, to the rectum. And some extra mice were given the radiation without the protection of Dsup, to provide a baseline for comparison. The 'rectal' group experienced about half as many radiation-induced double-stranded DNA breaks, compared with controls that did not receive Dsup protection. The 'mouth' group had about one third of the breaks of their peers. And the mRNA treatment seemed to have no effect on tumor volume. This research is just the beginning: the sample sizes were very small, and of course, we can't predict how human bodies will react to a treatment based solely on tests on lab-grown cells or mice. But it's enough to prompt further investigation, especially now they know they can get the mRNA safely into a cell without conferring the benefit on the cancer. "The use of Dsup mRNA delivery may be co-opted for several other clinical applications, including protection of normal tissue from DNA-damaging chemotherapies or progressive degeneration of specific tissues, cancer predisposition, chromosomal instability and hypersensitivity to DNA-damaging agents," the authors write. "In addition to cancer-related applications, the use of Dsup protein can be extended to total body exposure to space radiation or as prophylaxis against nuclear radiation exposure." This research was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. X-Rays of Viking-Age Skulls Reveal a Shocking Level of Disease US Measles Outbreak Surges Towards 100 Cases More People Are Risking Medical Advice From Chatbots. Here's Why.
