Part 7 of 7 Parts (Please read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 first)
     In 2016, Daly’s team received funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. They found that their synthetic manganese-decapeptide antioxidants were not only nontoxic in rodents when either ingested or injected, but they also protected the rodents from cosmic radiation. Mice treated with the MDP complexes survived gamma radiation for twice as long as the untreated control group.
     Daly said, “What excites me the most is the potential of this technique in revealing relative radiation sensitivity of cancer cells, based on their manganese-complex content.” The goal of this research was to investigate how these manganese-decapeptides could help protect cancer patients from the damage of chemotherapy which would give the human body’s own DNA and RNA repair mechanisms the protection they need to operate.
      Dea Slade is a medical biochemist at the University of Vienna who has previous experience with D. radiodurans. She feels personally most hopeful about these cancer-treatment applications. Slade said, “What excites me the most is the potential of this technique in revealing relative radiation sensitivity of cancer cells, based on their manganese-complex content. I left this field six years ago, and have only sporadically kept in touch with the developments—primarily in this area of manganese complexes. It’s perhaps the only area in Deinococcus biology worth pursuing right now.” Slade thinks that an early, non-invasive search for the total amount of various manganese complexes in a tumor may help doctors decide whether radiation therapy would be effective on a patient-by-patient basis.
     What is stopping this new vaccine technology from resolving our very pressing needs for the development of a coronavirus vaccine as quickly as possible? All of Tobin’s work at BMI is still only in the preclinical development phase. Many phases of human trials will still be needed in the creation of an effective vaccine. In Daly’s opinion, it would be ideal if more academic researchers and pharmaceutical companies started looking into the process of trying it out themselves.
    Daly said, “the MDP-complex is very easy to make. It’s not a trade secret. If they have laboratories where they can start growing the coronavirus, then they would be very much in a position to test these inactivated preparations on animals. Anyone can use our approach. It’s all been published.” Most major universities across the world already have the gamma irradiators that would be needed for such research. It is possible that Daly’s method could help quickly develop other important vaccines.
    Most of my postings have had to do with nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It was interesting in exploring how the use of ionizing radiation could be useful in the development of a much-needed vaccine for coronavirus which could save many lives. There are over one hundred vaccine candidates to combat coronavirus in current development. It would be interesting to know how many, if any, have been developed with the new viral techniques pioneered by Daly and Tobin.