@Janet Dafoe (Rose49),
I’m thrilled that Ron Davis is open to considering input and possibly testing Nandixon’s idea! There is something that occurred to me after reading Nandixon’s idea to test IL-6 antagonists to narrow down Suramin’s mechanism of action:
would Ron also test antipurinergic chemicals that are NOT antagonists for IL-6?
IF this hasn’t been considered already, I think it would nicely complement the tests with Tocilizumab to provide useful evidence in favor of (or to rule out) the role of P2 receptors in CFS.
In particular, I think that the blue dyes RB-2 (Reactive Blue 2) and BBG (Brilliant Blue G) would be quite interesting to test. RB-2 is an antagonist at
all but one of the same P2 sites that are antagonized by Suramin while BBG antagonizes the remaining receptor site not addressed by the RB-2. (
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v7/n6/fig_tab/nrn1928_T2.html?foxtrotcallback=true)
The downside of RB-2 is that I could only find a few animal studies and no human studies. However, for BBG there is a decent number of animal studies that prove efficacy in ATP-mediated pathologies; it was also used in the past as a dye to measure cardiac output in humans and it’s currently used as a stain in eye surgery in humans, plus there are some human in vivo studies showing no toxicity.
BBG and RB-2 don’t antagonize IL-6 (as far as I understand), which is why they could provide valuable extra info when compared to Suramin and Tocilizumab.
I’m linking some of the studies I found on BBG for reference (note BBG is also called Coomassie Blue):
A small study on 2 human subjects who didn’t experience any serious complication after very high-dose IM injections of BBG:
http://www.ahjonline.com/article/0002-8703(61)90638-X/pdf
Another study on BBG toxicity that mentions a total of 120 patients and up to 2000mg doses with no toxicity encountered:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1017608/?page=3
More for BBG:
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/30/12489.full
This study on BBG with fruit flies is used to approximate the toxicity potential of chronic exposure to waste products on the environments and humans which also doesn’t raise particular concerns:
http://www.ou.edu/journals/dis/DIS93/Okamoto 40.pdf
I think this evidence plus the fact that BBG is very similar to the common food dye F&D Blue N1 makes it very likely that at least BBG (if not RB-2) would be pretty benign, especially at lower doses.
