Emergency aid for overdoses
Every minute counts in the event of an overdose. ETH professor Jean-Christophe Leroux and his team have developed an agent to filter out toxins from the body more quickly and efficiently.
To date, antidotes exist for only a very few drugs. When treating overdoses, doctors are often limited to supportive therapy such as induced vomiting. Treatment is especially difficult if there is a combination of drugs involved. So what can be done if a child is playing and accidentally swallows his grandmother's pills? ETH professor Jean-Christophe Leroux from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at ETH Zurich wanted to find an answer to this question. “The task was to develop an agent that could eliminate many different toxic substances from the body as quickly as possible,” he says.
Leroux and his team knew that lipid emulsions can bind to drugs when injected into the blood stream. The researchers pursued this approach in their own studies, developing an agent based on liposomes, which are tiny bubbles with a lipid membrane as an outer layer. Instead of an intravenous injection, the agent is used as a dialysis fluid for so-called peritoneal dialysis. This method of dialysis is less common than haemodialysis, which is mainly used as a long-term form of treatment of kidney failure.