Chelators are a long-established treatment for poisoning by heavy metals such as iron, arsenic and lead. Abergel’s team is developing chelators, naturally occurring molecules that can form multiple bonds to a single metal ion.

She (TEDxAix Talk: Ambivalent radionuclides) shares more on the idea, not least that it’s been around for more than 60 years. Chemist Rebecca Abergel and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, have created molecules that bind to actinides to form large, stable complexes that are easier for the body to expel. Actinides such as plutonium, uranium and curium easily lock into our bones and organs, where they can emit radiation into our bodies for decades. It may not have to be this way. Nuclear weapons and accidents commonly release actinides, a group of radioactive elements at the bottom of the periodic table. The problem is, once radiation is in the body, it can be very hard to get out. Doctors can make a patient comfortable, treat burns and nausea, and try to keep the radiation from spreading. But an acute dose is usually fatal. For a person who has experienced high levels of radiation in a short period of time, from a nuclear weapon or a Chernobyl-scale nuclear power plant meltdown, treatment options are limited. Disrupted cells cause nausea, diarrhea and fever, then dizziness, weakness and hair loss. At high doses, radiation blasts throug h tissues, ruptures DNA strands and alters t he rhythms of cell division. Now they are trying to put their solution in a pill.Īfter the US dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two, more than 100,000 people died - many from exposure to radiation. Chemist Rebecca Abergel and her colleagues have found a way to remove radioactive contaminants from the body.

Radium poisoning