Research on anti-radiation drug continues: Weapons and Warfare

This episode of Weapons and Warfare revisits a pioneering effort to create a treatment that could protect troops from Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS). The project, featured in the first Weapons and Warfare episode and led by a Nebraska-based research team, is a significant advancement in military medical research for safeguarding troops in radiation-risk environments.

Host Ryan Robertson caught up with Dr. David Berkowitz for a project update. Berkowitz, a chemistry professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is one of the many researchers working with the National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI).

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the entire interview between Robertson and Berkowitz in the video above!

Ryan Robertson: Dr. David Berkowitz from the University of Nebraska, thank you so much for joining us today… We really want to talk to you about this important project that the university NSRI are all doing. We just got done watching the story. We talked to you back in December of [2023] originally. Now it’s the middle of summer ’24. What’s kind of the latest with the project?

Dr. David Berkowitz: So as we were talking about then, it’s all about trying to find MCMs — medical countermeasures for Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS). So it’s about trying to protect those who might encounter radiation, certainly our troops, and there really isn’t anything out there to protect them. And so that’s been the holy grail of this project.

It’s been really exciting collaboration between the basic scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, main campus, flagship campus, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center scientists, the biomedical scientists in Omaha under the banner of the National Strategic Research Institute — the NSRI. And we’ve progressed quite a bit since the last time we talked and we could, I could, go on and on, but maybe I should let you ask specific questions.

Ryan Robertson: When you say you progressed a bit, does that mean we’re on the cusp of having a prophylactic for ARS? Or are we, you know, is it still six months, six years down the road? I mean, what does that progression look like?

Dr. David Berkowitz: Well, now we have three or four candidates that look viable, but there are different stages along the pipeline, if you will. So some of [the drugs] are pretty early-stage candidates, meaning they really haven’t been in humans to test for safety. That would be sort of a phase one, a clinical trial, whereas the ones that are at a later stage have been in humans for a very long time, but not maybe for this application.

So we have these different flavors of candidates, which is very exciting because we do have as many as four that have potential. And that’s that’s the excitement. And last time I talked, we had one, maybe one or two, that looked really good. Now, there are a couple more that show real potential. One of these quite new in our studies, so you know, when we’re in the middle of the research, I never want to jinx it.

So there’s a lot of science that has to be done before [the drug] is both effective and safe. And at each stage, you start out with maybe cell line testing, in vitro testing. And then we have a wonderful member of the team at [University of Nebraska Medical Center] in Omaha, [Dr. Rebecca Oberley-Deegan], who’s the mouse model expert. And we have another mouse model expert — I didn’t mention this before — at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, that’s AFRRI in Bethesda, Maryland.

So this is also a collaboration with AFRRI, there are a lot of a lot of members of the team, and Rebecca Deegan compares her results with her counterpart at AFRRI. They sometimes have different mouse lines, so we’re mostly in mice. But as I mentioned, our top candidate has been in humans for other purposes before, so that gives you a sense of where the different candidates are along the pipeline.

Ryan Robertson: Since we’ve talked last, the world has also continued a spiral in the wrong direction, many would say. Do you feel a greater need now, more of an urgency now, to get this out there?

Dr. David Berkowitz: Yeah, absolutely. I mean this. You know, we work for the Defense Health Agency. We work for the Department of Defense. We’re acutely aware — and they’re even more aware than we are — of the international picture. And so this comes up even in our meetings, or our meetings are basically scientific. It’s natural to talk about the news of the day and the situations that happened, the war in Ukraine and the activities around Chernobyl that happened earlier.

There were soldiers in that space, and that space is still contaminated. They were not American soldiers, nonetheless, we talked about that. We wondered, you know, if there were Russians in there, what were they carrying, and what were things like this? The Ukrainian soldiers had to fight there. What would they carry? And so, those spots are very much current.

And then, you know, sort of the political tensions of the day, be they in Asia or in the Middle East, or in eastern Europe there, there are these hot spots where nuclear threats are discussed on a regular basis. There are threats. We are not policy people. We’re just scientists. But we’re acutely aware that, were we to be successful, we would have something that would protect our troops and keep them out of harm’s way when they go into potentially go into situations like this. And we’re also aware that if we’re successful, the civilian population could benefit, as well as a sort of broader impact of the work. 

Ryan Robertson: That kind of leads into my next question, Dr. Berkowitz. So we had recently done a show where we talked about moral injury. And moral injury is kind of the when things don’t go absolutely right, when the stakes are high, kind of the impact on a soldier, their moral conscience. When they have to do something as part of their job that they might have a moral objection too. We referenced Oppenheimer because it was on film, it was a good opportunity for Americans to see moral injury kind of played out for them.

My question is, you know, Oppenheimer had a whole lot of like, the science was necessary at the time but he had qualms about what his science was used for. You’re kind of on the other side of that right now with your team, right? We’re coming out of that Oppenheimer and the moral injury side of it and now we’re trying to get to the “moral solution.”

Dr. David Berkowitz: Yeah, we’ve never talked about it that way. So it’s an interesting point you bring up. So this is new for me to think about, but honestly, it’s interesting that you bring this up now, because there’s all this discussion about presidential immunity, and I thought about Harry Truman, who had to make that very difficult decision in World War II, and we were in such a struggle with Japan. And as we look back on that, it’s a difficult time in the history of the world to think about from a moral point.

We wanted to end the war. We wanted to save lives, and to save lives, many lives were lost. So these are difficult moral decisions that relate to nuclear weapons. Frankly, we hope they never used again. But what we’re trying to do, yes, is protect — not just from the fallout from the use of nuclear weapons, but from the fact that nuclear power is, I don’t know if it’s here to stay, but it’s incredibly important to the world right now.

In fact, I’m in France right now, and nuclear is a huge source of energy in this country. In the U.S. it’s still important. Obviously in Japan it’s important. So when we if we come up with a successful countermeasure, a prophylactic for Acute Radiation Syndrome, it would be useful for those who could be put in harm’s way, who are sent off to difficult and sensitive parts of the globe. But it has the potential to also kind of protect us as a people against the moral challenges of just using nuclear energy, which is still right. There’s always a danger there, and there’s always nuclear waste when you’re done.

So this the implications of what this project would mean, for a little bit, protection against these moral decisions, but most importantly, just for human health and well being for generations to come. These implications are large, so it’s both an awesome responsibility. But it’s a privilege to work with our core our representative from the Defense Health Agency, Dr. Alan Epstein, who guides us in this research as we we try to do something that we think would be really important.

But it’s going to take a while, to [answer] your earlier question. We haven’t done anything new in humans. We’re still in mice with what we’re doing, and some of our compounds have seen human experience. Closure, however, some of the results in mice are really quite remarkable, so we’re gearing up to to a much larger trial for our best couple candidates right now.

Ryan Robertson: Dr. Berkowitz, we wish you nothing but success in your endeavors… thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. David Berkowitz: Ryan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. I just want to say big shout out to Ken Bayles, who’s my partner. He’s the vice chancellor for research at the University of Nebraska Medical Centers. The two of us lead this and we have a wonderful team with about equal number of researchers from UNMC in Omaha, UNL in Lincoln and wonderful collaborators at AFRRI in Bethesda. We want to thank you at Straight Arrow News for keeping the world apprised of what’s going on. We appreciate your work.

Watch the first episode of Weapons and Warfare about protecting troops from Acute Radiation Syndrome here.

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