Then he huddles in his lab at the University of Utah and develops treatments the federal government hopes will protect Americans from the awful consequences of radiation exposure.

Lung cancer. Liver cancer. Bone cancer.

Now, he and his colleagues are on a fast track to deliver new drugs that help the human body excrete radioactive materials, whether they're inhaled, ingested or absorbed through the skin.

The drugs must be easy to take, available on a wide scale, and, of course, nontoxic themselves.

Perhaps most important, they need to be effective against any number of materials an enemy might use in a dirty-bomb attack.

"The dirty bomb changes things," says Miller, who heads the School of Medicine's radiobiology division. "If you have a nuclear worker working in a nuclear production plant, you know what they're going to be exposed to. If you have a dirty bomb, golly, that could be a lot of different things."

"A nasty situation": Last month, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease awarded Miller a $675,000 grant to develop anti-radiation treatments - ideally in the form of a pill - that can be added to our national stockpile.

Researchers at two other universities and one federal lab received a combined $3.3 million under the same initiative.

The national stockpile has a few countermeasures for radiation exposure, but they're effective against only a handful of materials, and they have to be given by injection, said Bert Maidment, associate director of product development in the agency's Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation.

"If you have a mass-casualty situation, that's probably not going to work for us, so we want to develop a [treatment] that's more easily distributable to an exposed population," he said. "We want to develop an oral formulation for these drugs so they will be more easily used in a nasty situation."

A dirty bomb isn't capable of causing Hiroshima-scale devastation because it lacks nuclear technology. What makes a dirty bomb so scary is its unpredictability.

Its radioactive ingredients can be delivered via an explosive device, an aerosol device or even a stationary object - such as a public trash can - that quietly emits radioactive materials as pedestrians pass by.

"Now, we've moved into the terrorism era," says Miller, who has been working in anti-radiation for 30 years. "We used to fear the threat from Russia, and now we fear whatever, wherever it might come from."

How to help victims: Miller received one of the grants because of his previous research in anti-radiation treatment.

He is one of the few scientists in the world the Russian government has allowed to analyze tissue samples and medical records of 27,000 former Soviet workers who built the country's first plutonium production plant under Josef Stalin.

"There are no humans left in the world who have these kinds of exposure," he says. "They didn't really know what they were working with, and they contaminated everything."

He and his colleagues already have developed compounds called chelators (KEE-lay-tors) that grab specific radioactive metals inside the body and help eliminate them naturally through urine or feces.

Their chelators are especially effective at getting rid of plutonium.

Their task now is to develop compounds that work against other elements, including mercury, uranium, lead and cadmium.

"Our chelators are meant to work in the absence of knowing too much about what [people] are exposed to," he says.

Ridding the body of radioactive material should minimize exposure and adverse health effects, Maidment says.

Miller and colleagues from several academic disciplines - including engineering, pharmacy, and geology and geophysics - will test those compounds in mice exposed to various radioactive materials.

In 18 months, he and researchers from the other institutions will share their preliminary data with Maidment's agency.

The government then will decide whether to press ahead with drug development and the Food and Drug Administration approval process.

If the drugs look promising, the agency will spend another 18 months to three years testing them in human safety trials and in animal trials that predict their effectiveness in removing radioactive materials from humans.

It could be three to five years before the drugs are tested, manufactured, purchased and added to the national stockpile, even on an emergency basis, Maidment says.

Believe it or not, that's a fast pace in the drug-development world.

"Even at this advanced, targeted, product-development phase, it's going to take time," he says. "You've got to do it right the first time. It has to work, and it has to be safe."

rlynn@sltrib.com

A look back at the U.'s division of radiobiology

* Opening the lab: The federal Atomic Energy Commission launched the Radiobiology Laboratory at the U. in 1950 to study long-term health effects of exposure to radioactive materials used in nuclear technologies. It was one of a handful of U.S. labs doing this kind of work. The commission owned the lab but contracted with the U. to operate it.

* Early research: In the 1950s, scientists at the lab studied plutonium, a newly discovered element found effective in nuclear power reactors. They also began studying how radioactive materials cause cancer. This work continues today.

* Looking for solutions: Scientists in the 1970s tested whether certain compounds bind to radioactive elements and promote their excretion from living organisms.

* U. takes over: The U. assumed ownership of the lab but continued to draw funding from the U.S. Department of Energy.

* Helping victims: Since the 1990s, division director Scott Miller and other university faculty have lent their expertise in radiation exposure cases, including those near the Nevada test site, American uranium workers, victims of the Chernobyl explosion and former workers who helped build the Soviet Union's first plutonium plant.

* Patented design: In 1995-96, Miller and scientist Fred Bruenger patented several orally administered compounds that eliminate plutonium from the body.

* A broader goal: Last month, Miller secured a federal grant to develop drugs that eliminate several radioactive materials from the human body.

Source: Scott Miller, director of the division of radiobiology at the University of Utah's School of Medicine