New York, October 17: Carbon monoxide, a deadly toxin, could be beneficial in treating various infections and organ transplantation if used in small, extremely controlled doses, a recent research has revealed.
According to Dr Patty J Lee, an associate professor of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine, a new research has shown that carbon monoxide, often called a silent killer, has benefits in everything from infections to organ transplantation and could also be a medical treatment.
“Carbon monoxide essentially suffocates the red blood cells – that’s the way we learned it in school,” said Dr Lee.
He added “scientific opinion of the idea has gone from completely skeptical to moderately skeptical…. Therapeutically, I think it has incredibly great potential”.
It seems like a radical contradiction, but animal studies show that in small, extremely controlled doses the gas has benefits in everything from infections to organ transplantation, an article published in The Boston Globe said.
The research is now experimented on people, who are given the gas at very low concentrations, while many doctors remain skeptical, the National Institutes of Health recently gave the idea a vote of confidence: The federal agency awarded a USD1.4 million grant to a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to study the underlying biology of how the gas works, it said.
Much of the driving force behind scientific interest in carbon monoxide has come from Leo Otterbein, an associate professor at Beth Israel Deaconess who first began considering the possibility that the gas was beneficial a decade ago, as a graduate student.
Otterbein was studying an enzyme that plays a critical protective role in the body, but worked in unknown ways. That helpful enzyme breaks down a substance in the body and creates carbon monoxide as a byproduct, so Otterbein began working on experiments to see whether the gas was providing a benefit.
Positive experimental results began to trickle in, but Otterbein faced skeptics.
“I went to a conference and said, “Wait till they see this data, they’ll be amazed. Guys stood up and made an absolute fool of me,” said Otterbein.
Since that time, Otterbein and other scientists have found that breathing the gas for an hour at about 5 to 10 percent of a fatal exposure has beneficial effects in animals with a range of illnesses, from malaria to cardiovascular disease.
While its actions are only partly understood, the gas seems to play a role in controlling inflammation, regulating cell death, and promoting repair and renewal.
Dr Jerzy W Kupiec-Weglinski, director of the Dumont-University of California, Los Angeles Transplantation Research Center, said that the research might explain anecdotal reports from the 1980s that kidney transplants seemed to work better in smokers than expected, since cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide.
–Agencies