Scientists in Tennessee are developing a promising drug they desperately hope will never be used.
It’s a treatment that could rescue people from gastrointestinal acute radiation syndrome. In blunt terms, radiation poisoning.
“We were so damn lucky to find this mechanism that nature invented for us,” said Dr. Gabor Tigyi, a cell biologist and cancer researcher at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis. “We made a drug to harness it. .. It took about 20 years to figure out what we had in hand.”