IPLEDGE program
Although the goal of the program is to prevent pregnancies of women who take the drug, male patients must also participate in anti-pregnancy restrictions, primarily due to fears that male isotretinoin users might share their prescriptions with females without their physicians' knowledge. There has been no link to birth defects from Accutane associated with males using the drug, though male sexual dysfunction has been suggested by one study. As this has not been conclusively proven, this is not acknowledged as a side effect in the official literature accompanying the medication.
Rebecca Abergel
Abergel’s BioActinide Research group conducts a variety of different experiments in the field of coordination chemistry, analytical chemistry, photophysics, biological chemistry, health physics, pharmacology, molecular biology, and cell biology. More specifically, her recent interests have focused on the coordination behavior of lanthanides and actinides. Her group is especially active in developing therapeutics to treat people who have been exposed to radionuclides or atoms that contain excess nuclear charge. These radionuclides can include plutonium, americium, curium, uranium, plutonium, and neptunium. Recent work by the BioActinide Research group has involved synthesis of different actinide chelating agents that could be used to selectively bind radionuclides in the human body in order to safely remove them.
Currently, the only drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat radionuclide contamination is diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (DTPA) (Figure 1). DTPA has shown some promise is treating plutonium poisoning, but this treatment is specific only to plutonium. Furthermore, DTPA must be administered intravenously, which is an issue due to the extremely time-sensitive nature of radiation poisoning. In the quest of finding a more versatile and easily administered treatment for radiation poisoning, Abergel sees potential in developing new classes of therapeutics.