Medicines from the Sea

Scientists across the world have been searching for new compounds that can fight disease, as more and more bacteria build up a resistance to antibiotics. There is also a long list of illnesses that have limited treatments and no cures, such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and AIDS.

One of the challenges facing researchers has been where to find new sources of medicine. They have looked in landfills, septic tanks, swamps, even chemical dumps for life forms that have some special mechanism of survival that can be exploited into a new drug discovery.

But for one scientist, Dr. William Fenical, the answer of where to look is simple: search in the sea.

Fenical is the head of the Center for Marine Biology and Biotechnology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. For more than 25 years he has dived all over the world in the search for a source of new medicines.

Through his voyages, Fenical has discovered a few organisms that are now being researched for pharmaceutical use, such as a substance produced by a tropical plant called a sea fan.

The sea fan produces molecules that work well in reducing inflammation. As a result, that plant is now being investigated by a biotech company called Nereus Pharmaceuticals in La Jolla.

Fenical recently found a chemical called eleutherobin that is produced by a soft coral, which stops cancer cells from diving. However, eleutherobin has proved too expensive and difficult to bring to mass market for now.

According to the diving doctor, his greatest discovery has been in the ocean mud. “We began to realize there was a vast component of the ocean that neither we nor others had understood at all,” says Fenical. “And this was the deep part of the ocean.”

After seizing upon the potential of this vast and unexplored region, Fenical began scooping mud off the bottom of the sea floor and cultivating in the lab. Soon, a promising bacteria called salinospora emerged.

Salinospora, which produces a chemical that kills cancer cells, has been licensed to Nereus Pharmaceuticals for potential drug development.

“We’ve really just begun to see the tip of an enormous iceberg of discovery,” exclaims the marine biologist, “that should lead us to literally hundreds of drugs.”