September 11, 2025
2 min read
Early Experiments Show Fast-Acting Antidote Targets Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
A study in mice and on human blood uses a new protein to snag carbon monoxide before it latches onto blood cells
A new antidote is designed to rapidly address carbon monoxide poisoning.
Carbon monoxide is a quiet assassin. Odorless and colorless, it has a uniquely efficient ability to starve the body of oxygen: It acts quickly, building up in the bloodstream and attaching to hemoglobin in oxygen’s place. When oxygen can’t attach, red blood cells don’t transport it around the body, effectively suffocating the organs.
This gas, a common by-product of incomplete fuel combustion, causes 50,000 to 100,000 emergency room visits and 1,500 deaths in the U.S. each year. Typical treatment uses an oxygen mask or hyperbaric chamber to overwhelm the body with oxygen, pushing the carbon monoxide molecules off the hemoglobin cells so that oxygen can attach instead. It’s effective, but it’s slow—and while only a small percentage of people with carbon monoxide poisoning die, survivors are often left with brain damage, cardiac complications or kidney and liver problems from oxygen deprivation.
But new research suggests a faster antidote. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA documents a newly engineered protein therapy called RcoM-HBD-CCC; given intravenously to mice, it was shown to cling to carbon monoxide (CO) and expel the poison via the kidneys within minutes.
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“We want a treatment that you can give in the field,” says study author Mark T. Gladwin, dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He says RcoM-HBD-CCC could be injected into people on their way to the hospital in an ambulance or to people with low oxygen levels at the site of fires.
“This molecule becomes CO-bound pretty much as soon as you inject it,” says study co-author and University of Pittsburgh researcher Jesus Tejero. Because it has a much higher affinity for carbon monoxide than carbon monoxide has to hemoglobin, RcoM-HBD-CCC quickly sponges up the toxin. In addition to the mouse study, the researchers also confirmed that the protein quickly clung to carbon monoxide in human blood in test tubes.
Lance B. Becker, an emergency medicine researcher at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, who was not involved in the study, notes that the new protein binds to carbon monoxide—but not to nitric oxide, a gas molecule that plays a key role in relaxing blood vessels to improve blood flow. Gladwin and his team had previously engineered a protein with an affinity to carbon monoxide—but it also bound to nitric oxide, causing problematic artery stiffening in early mouse tests.
Becker hopes this treatment will prove effective in planned studies with larger animals and eventually in human trials, which are likely still a few years off. Though researchers won’t know if it works in human bodies until they try it, Becker is optimistic. “It’s a very clever little molecule if it pans out, he says.”
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