PARIS: Some send divers in speedboats, others send submersible robots to explore the sea floor, and one team deploys a “mid missile” — all tools scientists can use to find the next powerful cancer treatment or antibiotic. So they use it to filter the oceans of the world.
A medicinal molecule can be found in microbes found in sediments, produced by porous sponges or sea squirts — barrel-bodied creatures that cling to the bottom of rocks or boats — or symbiotically in snails. by bacteria living on
But once a compound shows potential for treating Alzheimer’s or epilepsy, developing it into a drug typically takes a decade or more, and costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Suppose you want to cure cancer — how do you know what to study?” William Fenikel, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is considered a pioneer in the search for medicines derived from the sea.
“You don’t.”
With tight budgets and little support from big pharma, scientists often piggyback on other research campaigns.
Marcel Jaspers of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland said colleagues collect samples by dropping a large metal tube on a 5,000-meter (16,400-foot) cable that “rams” the seafloor. A more sophisticated approach uses small, remotely piloted underwater vehicles.
“I tell people, I really want a clay tube,” he told AFP.
This small but modern area of marine exploration is the focus of key negotiations for the UN High Seas Treaty, which covers waters beyond national jurisdiction, this week in marine reserves critical to protecting biodiversity. May wind up with new rules governing territories.
Nations have long squabbled over how to share the benefits of marine genetic resources in the high seas — including compounds used in medicines, bioplastics and food stabilizers, with the High Seas Alliance on the issue in talks. said co-leader Daniel Cachelares.
And yet only a small number of products containing marine genetic resources enter the market, with just seven recorded in 2019, he said. The potential royalty value is estimated at $10 million to $30 million annually.
But the vast biodiversity of the oceans means that there is still much to be discovered.
“The more we look, the more we find,” said Jaspers, whose lab specializes in the composition of Earth’s extreme environments, such as underwater hydrothermal vents and polar regions.
Natural source
Since Alexander Fleming discovered a bacteria-killing formula he called penicillin in 1928, researchers have used chemical compounds made from most terrestrial plants, animals, insects, and microbes to treat human diseases. studied and synthesized.
“Most antibiotics and anticancer drugs come from natural sources,” Fenikel told AFP, adding that when he started in 1973, people were skeptical that the oceans had anything to offer. Is.
In an early breakthrough in the mid-1980s, Fenikel and colleagues discovered a type of sea whip — a soft coral — that grows on reefs in the Bahamas produces a molecule with anti-inflammatory properties.
It caught the eye of cosmetics firm Estee Lauder, who helped develop it for use in their products at the time.
But the amount of sea whips needed to research and market the compound eventually forced Fenical to abandon sea animals and focus instead on microorganisms.
Researchers scoop up sediment from the ocean floor and then grow the microbes in the lab.
In 1991, Fenikel and his colleagues found a previously unknown marine bacterium called Salinispora in mud off the coast of the Bahamas.
More than a decade of work led to two anticancer drugs, one for lung cancer and the other for the incurable brain tumor glioblastoma. Both are in the final stages of clinical trials.
Fenikel — who at age 81 still runs a lab at Scripps — said the researchers are thrilled to have made it this far, but enthusiasm is tempered by caution.
“You never know if something is going to be really good, or not useful at all,” he said.
New frontiers.
That long pipeline comes as no surprise to Carmen Cuevas Marchante, head of research and development at Spanish biotech firm PharmaMar.
For their first drug, they started by cultivating and collecting about 300 tons of bulbous sea squirts.
“From one ton we could isolate less than one gram of the compound” he needed for clinical trials, he told AFP.
The company now has three cancer drugs approved, all derived from sea squirts, and has fine-tuned its methods to make synthetic versions of natural compounds.
Even if everything goes right, Marchante said, it can take 15 years between discovery and bringing a product to market.
In total, 17 marine drugs have been approved for the treatment of human disease since 1969, with about 40 in various stages of clinical trials worldwide, according to the online tracker Marine Drug Pipeline.
Those already on the market include a herpes antiviral from sponges and a powerful pain reliever from cone snails, but most treat cancer.
That’s partly because the high costs of clinical trials — potentially more than a billion dollars — favor the development of more expensive drugs, experts say.
But there is a “lot” of early-stage research on marine-derived compounds for anything from malaria to tuberculosis, said Alejandro Mayer, a professor of pharmacology at Midwestern University in Illinois, who runs the Marine Pipeline Project and Whose specialty is brain immunity. System. System.
Scientists say this means there is still great potential to find the next antibiotic or HIV therapy.
It can be produced by creatures buried in ocean sediments or silently clinging to the hull of a boat.
Or it may already be in our possession: laboratories around the world have libraries of compounds that can be tested against new diseases.
“There’s a whole new frontier,” Fenikel said.