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A Single Dose for Good Measure: How an Anti-Nuclear-Contamination Pill Could Also Help MRI Patients - Berkeley Lab
When chemist Rebecca Abergel and her team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) successfully developed an anti-radiation-poisoning pill in 2014, they hoped it would never have to be used.
That’s because the active pharmaceutical ingredient in the pill – what scientists call a “chelator” – is designed to remove radioactive contaminants from the body in the event of something horrible, like a nuclear reactor meltdown, or even worse: surviving a nuclear attack.
Now the researchers are studying how that very same pill could help to protect people from the potential toxicity of something else – the long-term retention of gadolinium, a critical ingredient in widely used contrast dyes for MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans.
When chemist Rebecca Abergel and her team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) successfully developed an anti-radiation-poisoning pill in 2014, they hoped it would never have to be used.
That’s because the active pharmaceutical ingredient in the pill – what scientists call a “chelator” – is designed to remove radioactive contaminants from the body in the event of something horrible, like a nuclear reactor meltdown, or even worse: surviving a nuclear attack.
Now the researchers are studying how that very same pill could help to protect people from the potential toxicity of something else – the long-term retention of gadolinium, a critical ingredient in widely used contrast dyes for MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans.