PDX Pharma’s President/CEO, Dr. Wassana Yantasee, gave a talk on the “Development of a New Oral Drug for Treating Chronic Mercury Exposure” on September 8th, at the 2018 International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT) Symposium, in Vermont.
Highlights from her talk include:
-Mesoporous silica functionalized with a dense thiol monolayer rug (SH-SAMMS) is much more superior to free thiols or thiols attached on the polymer resin counterparts for capturing toxic heavy metals in complex matrices.
-SH-SAMMS is aimed to be used daily as an oral drug for treating chronic heavy metal (mercury, cadmium, and lead) poisoning. It has many desirable characteristics; it has high selectivity for the target metals over essential minerals, it has a rapid metal removal rate, it has a high metal binding capacity, it works in a wide pH range of intestinal fluids, and it is safe to gut lining cells and residential bacteria, etc.
-When given orally to rats, SH-SAMMS reduced the body burden of mercury by limiting gut absorption of dietary mercury and facilitating the fecal excretion of already absorbed mercury, owing to the ability of SH-SAMMS to disrupting the enterohepatic recirculation of mercury.
-SH-SAMMS also reduced blood and bone Pb in rats.
-Gut bacteria cannot access the inorganic mercury bounded inside the nanopores of SH-SAMMS, thus it cannot convert the mercury into more absorbable forms (volatile and methyl mercury).