In Chemical and Engineering News, this news (article by Saima Sidik)
Paul Smith, a retired nurse anesthetist, has been contending with chronic lymphocytic leukemia since 2012, and his doctor suspects a tumor is forming in his pituitary gland. But despite the uncertainty about his health, a well-known cholesterol management drug is giving him a bit of hope.
Smith lives in a part of Barnstable, Massachusetts, called Centerville, where a local firefighter-training school and nearby airport contaminated the water supply for decades. The facilities allowed environmental leaks of fire-suppressing foam laden with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.”
Smith had been drinking the tainted water for years before he learned that it was sending his levels of certain PFAS soaring.
...Smith sought out cholestyramine after finding publications in the scientific literature about its potential benefit for people with high PFAS exposure. Smith’s gastroenterologist was familiar with cholestyramine and considered it safe, so he agreed to give Smith a prescription.
After about 8 months of taking cholestyramine, Smith has seen his PFAS levels drop dramatically. Two fluorinated chemicals became almost undetectable in his blood, and PFHxS dropped to about 30% of what it once was. “It was definitely a psychological boost,” he says.
It's probably not a surprise that there is some kind of drug that will absorb PFAS, but I'm glad there is one that seems to be readily available.
I wonder if it's stable enough to tether to a polymer for extraction from other fluids, and if the complexation is reversible. If you could attach it stable to polystyrene. could it be used to extract PFAS or concentrate them from a waste stream? - Hap
ReplyDeleteThe word "polymer" got me excited so I had to look it up, and it apparently is a crosslinked quaternized polystyrene derivative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colestyramine). Wonder if it would be something you could drop into current water treatment facilities that use ion exchange resins of similar chemistry (and if it would be specific enough to PFAS that it would work in wastewater).
DeleteEither way a remarkable thing to stumble upon.
Duh - I forgot it was a polymer already. - Hap
DeleteColestyramine is a simple anion exchange resin based on polystyrene. It was never a popular cholesterol lowering drug because the patients have to drink a voluminous slurry of ionex beads every day. I know this from a pharma chemist at Hoechst that worked on cholesterol-lowering drug candidate that inhibited bile acid re-absorption in gut, and for them, Colestyramine was a proof of principle drug that this cholesterol-lowering intervention mechanism would work. Bile acid reabsorption inhibition was a viable approach but it was superseded by statins (that lower not just cholesterol but also work against vascular inflammation by cholesterol-unrelated mechanism which has a complementary effect on CVD).
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