Pharmacological Activity
SOD has powerful antinflammatory activity. For example, SOD is highly effective in treatment of colonic inflammation in experimental colitis. Treatment with SOD decreases reactive oxygen species generation and oxidative stress and, thus, inhibits endothelial activation and indicate that modulation of factors that govern adhesion molecule expression and leukocyte-endothelial interactions. Therefore, such antioxidants may be important new therapies for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease.
Similarly, SOD has multiple pharmacological activities. E.g., it ameliorates cis-platinum-induced nephrotoxicity in rodents. As "Orgotein" or "ontosein", a pharmacologically-active purified bovine liver SOD, it is also effective in the treatment of urinary tract inflammatory disease in man. For a time, bovine liver SOD even had regulatory approval in several European countries for such use. This was truncated, apparently by concerns about prion disease.
An SOD-mimetic agent, TEMPOL, is currently in clinical trials for radioprotection and to prevent radiation-induced hair-loss. TEMPOL and similar SOD-mimetic nitroxides exhibit a multiplicity of actions in diseases involving oxidative stress. For a review, see Wilcox.
Read more about this topic: Superoxide Dismutase
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“The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)