A drug commonly used for managing symptoms has the potential to put the body on 'pause' in emergencies where every second counts. A team led by researchers from the Wyss Institute for In nature, a variety of animals go into torpor for days or weeks, experiencing significant drops in body temperature and metabolism to preserve energy. Similar to seasonal hibernation, torpor's brief periods of rest typically occur during periods of low food availability.
Being able to induce a torpor-like state in humans has benefits in medical settings where it may bide doctors more time to save their patient. The team behind this research thinks DNP – already FDA approved for use in humans – could help prevent permanent organ damage that sometimes occurs while a person is being transported to hospital. It's important that an organism going into torpor comes back out of the state safely.
In a , the researchers found that a different drug, SNC80, also induced torpor in tadpoles of the African clawed frog ( ). Unfortunately the compound isn't a viable option for use in humans due to its tendency to cause seizures. To find a safer candidate, the research team used a machine learning-based computational algorithm called Network Models for Causally Aware Discovery (NeMoCAD) to sift out 378 compounds likely to trigger similar reactions to SNC80 in the frogs.
Out of all of the possibilities, DNP bore the closest structural similarities. In some ways, it comes as little surprise – overdoses in A.