Energy Plan & Diving For Cures

(((STING)))

Making medicine from things found in nature is not new… but from ocean animals… that’s pretty recent.

Samara Freemark talks to a researcher who helps get them there.



Mark Slattery is trying to find a cure for cancer.

Slattery is a pharmacology professor at the University of Mississippi.

But he doesn’t really spend much time in the lab.

Instead, he’s usually in a wetsuit, taking samples from tens of thousands of corals and sponges, looking for that one special species that might make a chemical that could cure disease. He calls it, diving for cures.

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In many ways it’s like going out and playing your super lotto or whatever. You pick your eight numbers and you see if you hit or not.

Corals and sponges can’t run away from predators, so instead they squirt out chemicals that poison the fish that try to eat them.

Marc Slattery says those toxins are bad for the fish – but they could be good for people.

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Those particular compounds that tell a fish “not today” are the same ones that might tell the AIDS virus “you can’t replicate” or tell a cancer cell “you’re dead”.

So Slattery clips off bits of sponges and corals. When he gets back to the lab he extracts the chemicals– which is a nice way of saying …..

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Stick it in a blender with methanol and hexanes and all those sorts of things you used in organic chemistry lab –and the tarry residue that’s left is sort of the biochemistry that came out of that sponge. So you make a sponge smoothie? Exactly.

Once they’ve extracted the chemicals, researchers test to see if they have any human application. If a compound looks promising, it moves on to clinical trials. Those trials can take decades, which is why marine drugs are only now starting to hit the market. So far only two have been approved for use in the United States: a painkiller, and a cancer drug marketed by Johnson and Johnson.

I wondered how ocean conservationists felt about diving for cures.

So I called up Sandra [sahn-dra] Brooke. She studies corals at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute.

Brooke says she does worry that diving for cures could lead to over-harvesting.

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Once something becomes valuable to people, it becomes harder to regulate it.

But she says corals are under much greater threats. The biggest culprit? Industrial trawling. That’s when fisherman scrape reefs off the ocean floor so they can get to the fish.

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They are deliberately mowing down deep water coral ecosystems that are 1000s and 1000s of years old- some of the oldest animals ever measured. And that’s not going to come back.

There’s also the fact that oceans are changing as the climate does. Those changes mean corals are becoming weaker, releasing less of those chemicals that people like Mark Slattery hope could cure cancer one day.


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