Artificial enzymes made of treated charcoal could have the power to curtail damaging levels of , radical oxygen ions that are toxic at high concentrations.
The developed by a team are highly effective that break down damaging (ROS) produced in abundance in response to an injury or stroke.
The researchers suggested the materials, described in the American Chemical Society journal , could aid treatment of COVID-19 patients.
Artificial enzymes made of treated charcoal, seen in this atomic force microscope image, could have the power to curtail damaging levels of superoxides. Courtesy of the Tour Group
The biocompatible, highly soluble charcoal is a , and was synthesized and tested by scientists at Rice University, the University of Texas Health Science Center’s McGovern Medical School and the Texas A&M Health Science Center.
Superoxide dismutases, or SODs, dismantle ROS into ordinary molecular oxygen and hydrogen peroxide. In the project co-led by Rice chemist James Tour, previous materials were successfully tested for their ability to activate the process, including drawn from coal and made from carbon nanotubes.
They have now found oxidized charcoal nanoparticles are not only effective antioxidizers, but can also be made from an activated carbon source that is inexpensive, -certified and already being used in humans to treat acute poisoning.
“That these nanozymes are made from a GMP source opens the door for drug manufacturers,” said Tour, who led the project with A&M neurologist and UTHealth biochemist . “While coal was effective, an issue is that it can have a variety of toxic metallic elements and impurities that are not consistent across samples. And the clusters made from carbon nanotubes are very expensive.”
The disclike nanozymes are prepared from powdered, medical-grade charcoal oxidized by . The nanozymes teem with oxygen-containing functional groups that bust up superoxides in solution.
Tour noted the nanozymes are able to pass through the membranes of cells’ to quench a major source of free radicals without killing the cells themselves. “We on this recently,” he said. “This seems to be really important to why these work so well in traumatic brain injury and stroke.”
Artificial enzymes made of charcoal nanoparticles heavily oxidized with fuming nitric acid (HNO3) may quench toxic radical oxygen ions that appear at high concentrations in organisms after an injury. Courtesy of the Tour Group
The researchers noted it may be worthwhile to study the application of their nanozymes to treat the — an excessive immune system response to infection — suspected of .
“While speculative that these particles will be helpful in COVID-19, if administration is timed correctly, they could reduce the damaging radicals that accompany the cytokine storm and could be further chemically modified to reduce other injury-causing features of this disease,” Kent said.
Gang Wu, an assistant professor of hematology at McGovern, and Rice graduate student Emily McHugh are co-lead authors of the study. Co-authors are Vladimir Berka, a senior research scientist at McGovern; Rice graduate students Weiyin Chen, Zhe Wang and Jacob Beckham; Rice undergraduate Trenton Roy; and Paul Derry, an assistant professor at Texas A&M’s Institute of Biosciences and Technology.
Tour is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of computer science and of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice. Kent is the Robert A. Welch Chair Professor in the Institute of Biosciences and Technology at Texas A&M-Houston Campus and an adjunct chemistry professor at Rice and at Houston Methodist Hospital. Tsai is a professor of hematology at UTHealth.
The ³Ô¹ÏÍøÕ¾ Institutes of Health and the Welch Foundation supported the research.
