Intriguing Idea About the Evolution of Tardigrades (Water Bears)

[Recusant]

Borrowing the tardigrade resistance to radiation exposure. Sounds promising.

"Tardigrade Protein Could Soon Make Cancer Patients More Radiation Proof" | Science Alert

When it comes to surviving radiation, tardigrades really know their stuff, shrugging off doses that would annihilate most other life forms. Now researchers are using this knowledge to find ways to protect healthy cells during cancer treatments.

A team led by Ameya Kirtane from Harvard Medical School and Jianling Bi from the University of Iowa has isolated this superpower in the form of messenger RNA, which when injected into cells protects them from radiation.

When people undergo radiotherapy for cancer, it's not just the tumor that suffers. The radiation causes DNA breaks in healthy cells, too, leading to massive cell death and inflammation, which is responsible for the treatment's unpleasant side-effects.

[. . .]

Despite their cute monikers like moss piglet and water bear, the microscopic, eight-legged animals known as tardigrades are notoriously tough. Aside from surviving the hottest setting of your oven and pressures of 7.5 Gpa, they can handle around a thousand times the dose of ionizing radiation that would kill a human.

They can do this because of their ability to produce a unique protein Dsup (short for 'damage suppressing'), which helps them tolerate both the initial blast and the hydroxyl radicals that form in cells as a result, which would otherwise tear up one or even both strands of DNA.

Scientists have had their eyes on this protein as a potential aid to cancer treatment since it was discovered in 2016, and now they're one step closer.

That 2016 study showed that when expressed in human cells, Dsup reduces X-ray-induced DNA damage by about 40 percent, which is why the researchers are hopeful it could protect cancer patients from the serious side-effects of their treatment.

But Dsup has to be inside a cell's nucleus to work. Delivering this protein directly into each cell is not feasible, and integrating the genes for Dsup directly into DNA has its own risks.

"One of the strengths of our approach is that we are using a messenger RNA, which just temporarily expresses the protein, so it's considered far safer than something like DNA, which may be incorporated into the cells' genome," Kirtane says.

By wrapping the mRNA in specific polymer-lipid nanoparticles (one design best-suited to the colon, and one ideal for the mouth) they were able to smuggle the strands into lab-grown cells where they were used to generate large amounts of Dsup before disintegrating.

[Continues . . .]

The paper is behind a paywall.

Abstract:

Patients undergoing radiation therapy experience debilitating side effects because of toxicity arising from radiation-induced DNA strand breaks in normal peritumoural cells. Here, inspired by the ability of tardigrades to resist extreme radiation through the expression of a damage-suppressor protein that binds to DNA and reduces strand breaks, we show that the local and transient expression of the protein can reduce radiation-induced DNA damage in oral and rectal epithelial tissues (which are commonly affected during radiotherapy for head-and-neck and prostate cancers, respectively).

We used ionizable lipid nanoparticles supplemented with biodegradable cationic polymers to enhance the transfection efficiency and delivery of messenger RNA encoding the damage-suppressor protein into buccal and rectal tissues. In mice with orthotopic oral cancer, messenger RNA-based radioprotection of normal tissue preserved the efficacy of radiation therapy. The strategy may be broadly applicable to the protection of healthy tissue from DNA-damaging agents.

[Dark Lightning]

Patients will exit the radiation regimen looking like giant tardigrades. 

[Icarus]

The people doing this kind of research are quiet heroes.

This is not the kind of news, or hope for the future, that is likely to capture the attention of the great unwashed.

[Dark Lightning]

The people doing this kind of research are quiet heroes.

This is not the kind of news, or hope for the future, that is likely to capture the attention of the great unwashed.

Sad, but true. The great unwashed's ranks will increase immensely if the chump's policies continue. It's appalling how ignorant people are. I got a haircut this morning , and two guys were discussing how great it was that $65Bn had been shaved off the budget. They're going to find out the hard way, eventually.

[Recusant]

One thing is certain, nobody except perhaps a few Muskovites knows how much has been "saved." On the other hand the full extent of the damage that is being done is likewise unknown, but the country will likely be dealing with it for a long time. Speaking of damage, voting with the UN murderers' row (Russia, Belarus, North Korea etc.) in regard to affirming the sovereignty of an ally, that will be remembered.

* * *

Back to somewhere in the orbit of the topic. . .

Dark Lightning your comment about looking like a tardigrade got me thinking. Would I be willing to look like a tardigrade if the astounding durability came with it? I'm thinking centuries of life as well. Truly unpleasant looking like the interstellar navigators in the Dune universe, but with eight legs.

It's something I might consider, depending on what sort of life was available to such a monstrosity. It'd have to be good.      

An idea for a science fiction story maybe. A twist on Kafka's "Metamorphosis" where the narrator has chosen to transform and is loving it.