Activated Protein C, also known as Xigris, which has had an infamous and circuitous career of sorts, is back.
After a short life of use in severe sepsis, the continued investigations into its efficacy have finally been unable to establish its benefit. Although many expensive therapies without conclusive benefit are still in use in medicine, we’ll score this one (belatedly) for the good guys.
This early animal research, published as a letter in Nature Medicine, reports on interventions targeting the aPC pathway to prevent lethal radiation injury to hematopoietic cells. They say that starting infusions of aPC within 24 hours of lethal radiation exposure mitigated radiation mortality in mice. Probably quite a long way off for real-world usage, but any potential treatment is better than none.
“Pharmacological targeting of the thrombomodulin–activated protein C pathway mitigates radiation toxicity”