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SCIENCE: Primordial Ocean Ooze May Hold Wonder Drugs

Enrique Gili

SAN DIEGO, California, Feb 9 2007 (IPS) - A new breed of prospector is hunting for buried treasure on the sea floor, this time looking for breakthrough drugs derived from the natural heritage of the world’s oceans.

Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography believe that this vast and unexplored region may hold medical treatments for a host of ailments, from infectious diseases to cancer.

From his seaside corner office overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Dr. William Fenical, director of the Scripps Centre for Marine Biotechnology, presides over a research facility that has discovered more microorganisms in a single teaspoon of ocean water than there are trees in an entire rainforest.

He believes they have the potential to save the lives of millions of people. While most people don’t usually associate medical benefits with poisonous snails (anaesthetics) or prickly horseshoe crabs (insulin), traditional medicine has long recognised the healing power of naturally occurring substances found in the world’s ecosystems.

For example, the discovery of penicillin on slime molds augured a medical revolution with the development of antibiotics, saving countless lives since the mid-1940s.

Indeed, as many as half of all new medicines developed are not synthetically generated in laboratories, but are instead derived from naturally occurring compounds discovered in the wild. Currently there are 120 drugs on the market derived from chemical compounds found in nature. And herein lies the problem. Scientists for decades have relied upon a narrow band of terrestrial life when three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered in water. And as habitats are lost to the buzz of chainsaws, so do opportunities for new drug discoveries diminish.

Scripps scientists are now turning to the sea for chemically active compounds. “The ocean represents a major frontier for biomedical research. The vast numbers of genetically diverse organisms found in the sea provide an almost unlimited potential for new drug discoveries,” Dr. Fenical told IPS.

Of the 37 diverse phyla of life, only 17 occur on land, yet 34 of the 37 also occur in the ocean and the largest proportion of biodiversity exists in the ocean. There are an estimated 10 million unique organisms – animal, plant and bacteria – living in the sea, and there can be as many as one thousand plant and animal species occupying one cubic yard of water.

During the past 20 years, approximately 12,000 novel compounds have been isolated from marine organisms for a variety of commercial applications from superglues to cosmetics. The diversity of bioactive compounds found in the marine environment is due in part to the elaborate defences and extreme competition among organisms for space and resources.

In recent years, Dr. Fenical and his team of scientists have been exploring the ocean floor, looking for bioactive compounds in U.S. territorial water and investigating natural resources no one has yet to claim or fight over.

Equipped with glorified spring-loaded ice cream scoopers, they harvest nutrient-rich ooze from the primordial ocean bottom, searching for microscopic organisms containing chemical compounds that form the building blocks of drug science research in laboratories.

Ten years of painstaking field research is beginning to yield results. After accumulating a treasure trove of microbes, Scripps’ scientists have identified two cancer-fighting compounds that are in various stages of clinical trials. As of 2006, 30 similar molecules derived from marine sources are in clinical development.

So far, their discoveries haven’t sparked a liquid gold rush. Finding a treatment for disease amid millions of organisms is comparable to extracting a gold nugget from a mountain of rubble. Thousands of hours of lab work might yield one chemical compound with medicinal properties.

Placed in Petri dishes, the specimens are mixed with minute amounts of disease-causing biological agents. The reaction is monitored and analysed, and the results tabulated by research scientists. The system quickly weeds out failures, enabling them to focus only on chemically-active compounds, with minimal human intervention.

This pharmacological version of the “back to nature” movement marks a shift in thinking. During the 1980s, many researchers thought new drugs would come primarily from the biotech field and from labs specialising in designer molecules. But so far, efforts to genetically engineer or synthesise wonder drugs have not yielded the desired results.

“Drug companies have given up on making new drug discoveries for drug development,” said Dr. Fenical.

Although Fenical trolls for microbes in U.S. territorial waters, other researchers have come under fire from developing countries for exploiting natural resources while conferring little or no economic benefit to them.

If organisms are harvested from the seabed in regions beyond national jurisdiction, a legal debate arises. Proponents argue that deepsea genetic material is part of the “common heritage of humankind,” and thus should be subject to a profit-sharing scheme, similar to a law of the sea treaty that was established to split revenues generated from deep-sea mining.

“The IUCN (World Conservation Union) would like to see a practical solution that encourages research and innovation, but recognises on equitable principles that there should be some form of benefit sharing,” said Kristina Gjerde, a high seas policy advisor for the IUCN, the world’s largest conservation network, uniting 111 government agencies, more than 800 non-governmental organisations and some 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries.

Dr. Fenical rebuffs the argument that Scripps somehow profits directly from its drug research. “I earn 90,000 dollars a year,” he said, pointing to a spare part scavenged from a desktop computer by way of example of the institution’s frugality.

The Scripps Institution was founded in 1903 as an independent biological research laboratory, and became part of the University of California in 1912. All told, the campus runs 200 hundred research programmes with 1,600 hundred people, and has not grown measurably in size since the early 1900s.

Regardless of who benefits, he sees a vast untapped medical potential for marine microbes, envisioning new opportunities for exploring the genetic diversity of marine life through DNA sequencing that could eventually lead to unprecedented discoveries of new classes of drugs essential to the fight against cancer.