Content provided in partnership with

Drugs From The Sea - finding new drugs in ocean - includes related article on cancer research

Discover, March, 1999 by Rosie Mestel

There's only one place left to find the next wave of supermedicines. Fortunately, it's where we should have been looking all along

Outside the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, the sights, sounds, and smells are all of a seaside paradise--salty breezes, crashing blue green waves, picturesque piers, even people fighting gulls from their burgers as the wind whips napkins away. Inside, in biologist William Fenical's lab, it's good-bye to the sea's charms and hello to the smelly and slimy, the creepy and crawly, the disgusting and fascinating world of creatures scooped from that ocean outside, ground up, and thrown at every frightening disease he can think of.

More Articles of Interest: Medicine from the sea - medicinal qualities of sea plants - includes related...; Natural Products from the Sea: Ethnopharmacology, Nutrition and Conservation; Call of the sea; Undersea Riches - undersea mining is increasing rapidly, and many are...; The, six best supplements you've never heard of: these secret weapons can...

This is the medicine chest of the next millennium--teetering mounds of agar-filled dishes smothered with fuzzy greenish growths, flasks full of brown nutrient broth layered with gray mold, beakers sporting pale, flabby eruptions like omelettes cooking in hell's kitchen. What's brewing in these potent pots? Stews of bugs--fungi and bacteria that once lived in ocean sediments, rotting driftwood, weeds, coral, sponges, and grasses. Although unappealing, any one of these containers might harbor a brand-new kick-ass cancer drug or a compound to wipe out some of the scariest viruses known to humankind.

Fenical's quest may be critical to the future of medicine. We need new drugs. The glory days of antibiotics are over. Bacterium after bacterium is gaining resistance to our arsenal.

Doctors are desperate for compounds to attack cancer, Alzheimer's, AIDS, and a long list of other diseases for which there are limited treatments and no cures. Since that momentous day in 1928 when Alexander Fleming first noticed that a common mold blown in through an open window stopped staphylococcus bacteria from growing in a petri dish--his discovery of penicillin--researchers have been looking in increasingly exotic locations for the next strain of antibiotics. The search has intensified in landfills, septic tanks, swamps, chemical dumps, and trash piles.

But the returns are dwindling fast. "In the old days you could wander around a cornfield or up in a forest, take little dirt samples, bring them back to the lab--and what do you know? You'd found microorganisms that produce streptomycin, or actinomycin, or vancomycin," says Fenical, who is the director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine. "Today when you do that you find streptomycin, actinomycin, or vancomycin--the same things. Of everything you find, 98 percent turns out to be something you've found before. It's costly; it's inefficient. And when you look at a graph and you see disease resistance going up and drug discovery going down, it's also downright frightening."

Fenical's lab of weird concoctions may be proof of his conviction that drug hunters need to look in new places. His answer is surprisingly simple: search the sea. Since the 1980s he has been plunging into the ocean to find the next wave of medicines. Already he and his colleagues have dredged up some promising candidates: chemicals that soothe swelling, from lovely tropical organisms called sea feathers; a compound from a bulbous yellow soft coral that disrupts cell division in cancer cells, like taxol, the breast cancer drug derived from yew trees; and virus-killing proteins from ocean molds that live in sea grasses.

Fenical is not alone in this effort. Just a few doors down from his lab, chemist John Faulkner has been in the business even longer, dragging molecules from sponges that might fight cancer, kill viruses, or help scientists better understand how cells in our bodies grow and divide. In labs around the world, the search on this new frontier has in tensified. Today the list of novel potential anticancer drugs at the National Cancer Institute's Natural Products Branch includes more candidates from the ocean than from the land. Several promising drugs from the sea that might be used to treat leukemia--including one from a creature called Bugula, which clings to the bottoms of boats--are involved in human trials.

The ocean is by far the major habitat on the planet--it's 70 percent of Earth's surface," explains Fenical. "It's teeming with unique organisms. More than half the organisms in the ocean don't even occur on land."

That's the good news. The bad news is that it's difficult to know just where to look. When it comes to marine life, the rich history of ethnomedicine provides hardly any clues. There's precious little romance, either. Finding new compounds is a laborious process of trial and error, of collect, grind, and test. Still, Fenical and his colleagues have come up with strategies to narrow their search.

The first strategy is to go to a place where life is diverse and concentrated, such as a reef in the Caribbean. An environment rich in sea life is more likely to yield varied specimens. The next step is to try to gather what hasn't been stud led before. "Don't even bother with this one," says grad student Helene Vervoort, pointing to a picture of a strange, spreading green blob--a sea squirt more properly called Lyssoclinum bistratum. She recalls pulling it up the first time she dove, only to be greeted back on the boat with "God, that green thing again!"

Drugs From The Sea - finding new drugs in ocean - includes related article on cancer research

Discover, March, 1999 by Rosie Mestel

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Arts

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference