Drug Said to Protect the Body from Radiation Sickness

According to an article at Gizmag, researchers in the US and Israel have developed a drug that provides a sort of protection against radiation sickness.

Sounds a little too good to be true. But if it is true, the medication could not only help victims of nuclear fallout, but it could also allow for higher doses of radiation to be used in cancer therapies without fear of further sickening or even killing the patient.

In this respect, the drug could be a major breakthrough in cancer treatment.

Administered by injection, the preventative medication does its job by "suppressing the 'suicide mechanism' of cells hit by radiation, while at the same time enabling them to recover from the radiation-induced damage that triggered the suicide mechanism in the first place."

The medication is the brain-child of Professor Andrei Gudkov, Chief Scientific Officer at Cleveland BioLabs, and it could go up for FDA approval as soon as late 2010.