Radiation is one of the most effective means of killing germs, but it has been used clinically to treat only the cancer. This may be about to change. For the first time, researchers have turned radiotherapy against infection.
With antibiotic resistance on the rise in bacteria, medical researchers are looking beyond traditional drug therapies. One possible source of new weapons is radioimmunotherapy (RIT), a technique used to treat cancer patients. RIT works as a radiation treatment, but tumors blasting zone with radiation from outside, individual radioactive atoms are injected into the blood and circulate through the body. The trick is to fix the atoms emitting radiation to antibodies to proteins for locking onto the surface of the tumor cell. This ensures that the tumor cells overlap with RIT molecules while normal cells are spared the radiation DNA-blasting.
To see if RIT could be useful against an invading pathogen, Kate Dadachova, biologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine antibody in New York, and colleagues designed to bind to the surface of Cryptococcus neoformans , a tenacious fungus that plagues AIDS patients. In a paper published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the team shows the courage to RIT as a fungus fighter. When infected mice were injected with the antibody alone, they died just as quickly as untreated mice. But when radioactive bismuth-213 or rhenium-188 atoms have been hung on the antibody, infections began to clarify and the survival of the mice increased up to 60% at the end of the tests. And the best news is that RIT does not seem to kill the bone marrow, a side effect that has limited the use of RIT in the treatment of cancer. Given this initial success in mice Dadachova believes that any kind of infection can potentially be treated with RIT.
"The data clearly indicate that RIT can be effectively used to treat fungal infections," said Gregory Adams, an oncologist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. Adams warns, however, that there could have difficulty scaling technique from mouse to man, and there could be damage to long-term tissue radiation.
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