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Exposure to radiation can be deadly if it is strong enough. This could happen during cancer treatments, exposure to nuclear material, or someday, by going out into space for longer periods of time. Researchers looking for ways to protect human cells from radiation have come across an option that is showing a lot of promise.
Their proposal is to use a protein from tardigrades and deliver it to human tissue using messenger RNA delivery systems. Tardigrades are one of the most durable creatures that we know of. They are microscopic and live in almost every environment, including those that are extremely hot. Tardigrades that are thawed out from being in a deep freeze in the Arctic have sprung back to life with no problems.
There have even been tardigrades that have been exposed to the vacuum of space without dying.
So, to put it simply, these little guys are very durable and have no problem enduring exposure to radiation. In fact, experiments have shown that they are able to endure 3000-4000 times more radiation than humans.
With that in mind, a team that is being led by Harvard Medical School instructor and MIT visiting scientist Ameya Kirtane is working to use messenger RNA encoding to deliver the protein directly into mice. They have published a paper on this effort in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
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They found that the technique was very effective and was able to provide the mice’s DNA with significant protection from radiation damage. Giovanni Traverso is an MIT associate professor of medical engineering. In a statement on the effort, he said:
“Radiation can be very helpful for many tumors, but we also recognize that the side effects can be limiting. There’s an unmet need with respect to helping patients mitigate the risk of damaging adjacent tissue.”
Radiation treatment for cancer tumors is often described as poisoning the patient and the tumor, and hoping that the tumor dies first. While this is obviously an oversimplification, it isn’t entirely wrong. If oncologists could treat the healthy tissue around the tumor with this new technique, they would be able to use much more powerful radiation on the tumor itself without risking harm to the patient. This could make treatment far faster and more effective.
Using the mRNA delivery technique will also provide many benefits, Kirtane explains:
“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.”
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In addition to helping with cancer treatments, this technique could be given to astronauts who are planning to be in space beyond the protective magnetic field of Earth. For example, if they were going to the moon or Mars. In those situations, having this protective protein could be essential for the long-term health of these explorers.
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