Those ailments have something in common: They hinge on problems with low oxygen, problems the government's research suggests nitrite can ease.
Often used as a meat preservative, the work promises to rewrite scientific dogma about how blood flows, and how the body tries to protect itself when that flow is blocked. Nitrite seems to guard tissues - in the heart, the lungs, the brain - against cellular death when they become starved of oxygen.
NIH researchers are filing for new patents on this old, overlooked chemical and are hunting a major pharmaceutical company to help develop it as a therapy - even as doctors await the enrollment of sick patients into research studies in coming months.
Scientists are so convinced of nitrite's promise that lead researcher Dr. Mark T. Gladwin says the government will pursue drug development on its own if necessary.
He says, "We think we stumbled into an innate protection mechanism."
Dr. Christian Hunter of California's Loma Linda University says, if it works, "This drug would be pennies to dollars per day."
By January, Hunter hopes to begin studies of nitrite treatment for babies with an often fatal disease called pulmonary hypertension.
