A golden bullet against hangovers

A common saying with alcohol is “know your limits”. It’s not just about how much alcohol you drink in a week or a month, but how much you drink in one sitting. A sudden influx of too much alcohol can damage your liver, but what if your body was simply better at processing it?

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a gel that gets to work in the intestines, breaking down alcohol before it gets to the bloodstream. While the liver converts alcohol into acetaldehyde, a toxic chemical responsible for many of alcohol’s long term negative effects, the gel turns it into acetic acid, which is harmless.

The gel is made out of whey proteins immersed in iron, glucose and gold. Producing it in gel-form was chosen because it takes a while to digest, so it can get to work in the gastrointestinal tract for as long as possible. A reaction between the glucose and gold creates the miniscule amounts of hydrogen peroxide required to break down alcohol in the intestine (but in larger quantities this is not something you should ever ingest).

The product was tested on mice, monitoring their blood alcohol levels after drinking it. Some mice were only given alcohol once while others received it regularly for ten days. For the single dose, the gel reduced blood alcohol by 40% after 30 minutes and up to 56% after five hours, when compared to the control group. For the mice given regular doses, researchers found benefits beyond just removing alcohol: the mice given the gel had less weight loss and less damage to the liver, spleen and intestines. The mice were better at metabolising fat in the liver, probably thanks to less strain being put on it by alcohol.

Earlier research found that iron reacts with alcohol to produce acetic acid, breaking it down. This happened too slowly to be useful, but the team in Zurich have found a way to speed it up.

“Instead of using larger nanoparticles, we opted for individual iron atoms, which can be distributed more evenly on the surface of the fibrils and therefore react more effectively and quickly with the alcohol,” says Professor Raffaele Mezzenga.

Having applied for a patent, the researchers will still need to carry out clinical tests before humans can start using the gel. Mezzenga points out that while reducing alcohol intake is the healthiest option,

“the gel could be of particular interest to people who don’t want to give up alcohol completely, but don’t want to put a strain on their bodies.”

Right now, it’s not clear how long we’ll have to wait before this becomes available to the public, or whether there will be an obstacle that stops it reaching pharmacy shelves. The World Health Organisation estimates that alcohol abuse kills 3 million people annually, and for now we’ll need to rely on alcohol-free alternatives and responsible drinking campaigns to bring that number down. One day, you could be ingesting alcohol-gel to prepare you for that ultimate night out, but until then, know your limits!

by Louis Davies @louis.on.air

Source:

Su, J., Wang, P., Zhou, W. et al. (2024). Single-site iron-anchored amyloid hydrogels as catalytic platforms for alcohol detoxification. Nat. Nanotechnol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-024-01657-7