“Rice University’s Jim Tour and his colleagues at two Houston health institutions have found a drug that, when given to mice before radiation exposure, is 5,000 times more effective than the best-available therapy for radiation injuries.

Officials at the Department of Defense, seeking remedies for the radiation sickness that would follow a nuclear strike, were so taken by the research that they recently gave Tour a $540,000 grant and asked him to compress the next phase of testing into an almost unheard-of nine months.

In that time, Tour’s research group hopes to improve the drug so it works as well when given after radiation exposure as it does before.” (Houston Chronicle)