Cancer patients are subjected to a wide variety of treatments. One of the adverse and common side effects of cancer medication is arrhythmia, and here is how the C28 compound can tackle it.
What Causes Arrhythmias?
Prolonged exposure to cancer and other strong medications can affect your heart’s electrical signals, making it skip a beat or two. Doctors can diagnose arrhythmias by just checking your heart’s rhythm. Stroke, lung, and breast cancer medications often lead to arrhythmias.
How Does Arrhythmia Affect You?
Individuals often don’t experience a minor skip, but arrhythmia can affect in numerous ways like:
- Fatigue or weakness
- A spinning head, anxiety
- Frequent fainting or near to faint symptoms
- Pounding heart, breathing difficulties, chest pain
- Cardiac arrest or sudden death
The American Heart Association has reports saying that about 200,000 to 300,000 sudden deaths in the U.S are caused due to severe arrhythmia.
What Is a C28 Compound?
The Renaissance School of Medicine researchers invented the C28 compound, scientifically known as “Torsades De Pointes” at Stony Brook University, led by Ira S. Cohen, professor in physiology and biophysics.
The heart produces an electric Q wave that should reach the T wave within a stipulated period of time. This is known as the QT interval, and medication affects this signal, causing QT prolongation, which is termed arrhythmia medically.
The researchers have invented a new compound through continuous experimental and computational methods. This new Compound called C28 could prevent and reverse the QT prolongation bringing the heart rhythm back to normal.
How Was C28 Discovered?
The initiative to find treatments for arrhythmia was undertaken by several research scientists. Few notable types of research that inspired the discovery of torsades de pointes are:
A member of the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center and Institute for Data Science and Informatics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Xiaoqin Zou, and colleagues researched IK potassium channels with similar functions as a QT wave.
They studied the fluctuations in IK’s using the atomic structure of the KCNQ 1 unit of the protein. A software program named Mdock test was developed to monitor the changes using 50 negative energies that were either tight or binding.
The C28 compound discovered by Zou and her colleagues, Cohen, and his team experimented further to identify its potential strength.
Benefits
Most of the lives of cancer patients revolve around consuming medication and going through treatment for cancer, followed by taking new medications to curtail the side effects caused by cancer medications.
Many effective cancer medications were removed from the market because they caused arrhythmia when consumed at higher doses. Since the C28 compound can prevent and reverse the OT prolongation, it eliminates the risk of arrhythmia and could bring these potentially effective medicines back to the market.
