[font face=Times, Times New Roman, Serif][font size=5]Responding to the Radiation Threat[/font]
[font size=4]Berkeley Lab Researchers Developing Promising Treatment for Safely Decontaminating Humans Exposed to Radioactive Actinides[/font]

March 06, 2012
Lynn Yarris (510) 486-5375 lcyarris@lbl.gov

[font size=3]The New York Times recently reported that in the darkest moments of the triple meltdown last year of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japanese officials considered the evacuation of the nearly 36 million residents of the Tokyo metropolitan area. The consideration of so drastic an action reflects the harsh fact that in the aftermath of a major radiation exposure event, such as a nuclear reactor accident or a “dirty bomb” terrorist attack, treatments for mass contamination are antiquated and very limited. The only chemical agent now available for decontamination – a compound known as DTPA – is a Cold War relic that must be administered intravenously and only partially removes some of the deadly actinides – the radioactive chemical elements spanning from actinium to lawrencium on the periodic table – that pose the greatest health threats.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are developing a much more effective alternative that decontaminates a large number of the actinides likely to be part of the radiation exposure from a nuclear plant or weapon, including plutonium, americium, curium, uranium and neptunium. Furthermore, 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.

“With the expanding use of nuclear power and unfortunate possibility of nuclear weapon use, there is an urgent need to develop and implement an improved therapy for actinide contamination of a large population,” says Rebecca Abergel, a chemist who leads the Bioactinide Group at Berkeley Lab’s Glenn T. Seaborg Center. “We are now in the process of demonstrating that our actinide-specific decontaminating agents are ready for clinical development.”

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Abergel says the basic research and development phase of these two candidates has been completed and she and her group have started the process with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to determine what further data is needed to move into clinical trials. Typically at this stage of development a private pharmaceutical company would step in but it is difficult to attract private investors for a drug that will hopefully never be needed.

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