Diving for Cures

  • Researchers are hoping to find cures underwater in corals and sponges. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Making medicine from things
found in nature isn’t a new
idea. Think, aspirin – which
originally came from the bark
of willow trees. Now drugs
derived from ocean animals are
slowly making their way onto
shelves. Samara Freemark talks to a researcher
who helps get them there:

Transcript

Making medicine from things
found in nature isn’t a new
idea. Think, aspirin – which
originally came from the bark
of willow trees. Now drugs
derived from ocean animals are
slowly making their way onto
shelves. 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, scuba diving off the coasts of places like Guam and Antarctica.

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

“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.”

The idea is pretty simple. A third of the medicines on shelves today were derived from plants and animals that live on land. So ocean researchers got to thinking that the organisms they studied probably also produced a lot of useful chemicals.

Take corals and sponges. They can’t run away from predators, so instead they squirt out chemicals that poison the fish that try to take a bite out of them. Marc Slattery says those toxins are bad for the fish – but they could be good for people.

“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” or those kinds of things.”

So Slattery and other researchers like him clip off bits of sponges and corals. When they get back to the lab they extract the chemicals, which is a nice way of saying…

“Stick it in a blender with methanol and ethyl acetate and hexanes and all those sorts of things you used in organic chemistry lab, and you throw away the dead sponge, 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 ocean-derived 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 Brooke. She studies corals at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. Brooke says she does worry that diving for cures could lead to over-harvesting.

“Once something becomes valuable to people, there’s a resistance to closing access to it. It becomes harder to regulate it.”

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

“It’s just like the clear cutting of the forest, but on a much vaster scale. They are deliberately mowing down these deepwater coral ecosystems that are thousands and thousands of years old – some of the oldest animals ever measured. And that’s not going to come back – not in our lifetimes, not in many lifetimes.”

There’s also the fact that oceans are changing as the climate does. Those changes mean corals are becoming weaker. Marc Slattery thinks he might be seeing that in a Pacific reef he’s been studying for fifteen years.

“When we went back and started looking at it, we noticed that there was a change in the chemistry through time. As things have heated up on the reefs, there’s a physiological effect that has cascaded down into their ability to produce the chemistry we’re used to seeing. Early on it was so apparent, it was always there, and now they seem to be able to produce less of it.”

That’s means that today the cure for cancer might be out there in some coral reef, but it could be gone tomorrow.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Developing New Test for Deer and Elk Disease

Chronic Wasting Disease is killing wild deer and elk. And it’s slowly spreading to new areas in North America. Right now, tests for the disease are done after the animals are dead, but researchers say they might be getting closer to a test that can be given to live animals. The GLRC’s Christina Shockley reports:

Transcript

Chronic Wasting Disease is killing wild deer and elk. And it’s slowly spreading to new areas
in North America. Right now, tests for the disease are done after the animals are dead,
but researchers say they might be getting closer to a test that can be given to live animals.
The GLRC’s Christina Shockley reports on what this might mean in the fight against the disease:


Chronic Wasting Disease, or CWD, causes deer and elk to waste away and die.
The disease is causing hunters and wildlife officials to worry about the
future of the wild deer population. Right now, testing a brain sample from a
dead animal is the sure-fire way to detect the infectious protiens, called prions, that
cause the disease.


Alan Young is a Veterinary Science professor at South Dakota State University.
He’s developing the new test.


“Our ultimate goal is basically to develop a test for infectivity in blood,
by taking a blood sample, and then analyzing for the presence of the infectious prion protein.”


Young says a blood test would let deer and elk farmers know if their herds are
infected before the animals die. He says the research could also lead to a cure for CWD.


For the GLRC, I’m Christina Shockley.

Related Links

City Fights to Save Dying Elms

Dutch elm disease is killing dozens of stately old trees in the Midwest this summer. Many people say they regret losing the beautiful old trees. It changes the way a place looks and feels for years to come. Some people are willing to fight and pay to save the elm trees in one Chicago suburb. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jody Becker reports:

Transcript

Dutch elm disease is killing dozens of stately old trees in the Great Lakes region this summer. Many people say they regret losing the beautiful old trees. It changes the way a place looks and feels for years to come. Some people are willing to fight and pay to save the elm trees in one Chicago suburb. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jody Becker reports:


When Hollywood producers come looking for the perfect leafy suburb, they often wind up in Evanston, Illinois. This summer’s Tom Hanks flick “The Road to Perdition” was shot here. Filming almost hit a glitch…when Dreamworks suggested removing an old tree to make way for a driveway, the city balked. The scene was filmed; the tree stayed.


Evanston has dozens of trees at least a century old; and some even older than that.


Today, Evanston residents are even fighting a directive from the state’s Department of Transportation to replace obsolete traffic lights because it might mean uprooting some trees. So Evanston’s city Arborist Paul D’Agostino clearly has a rough job: he’s in charge of cutting down trees in a city of tree huggers.


“I’ve had to console people who were crying and hugging their tree and convince them that we were doing the right thing, that there was no choice in the matter.”


Like a handful of tree studded suburbs around Chicago and dozens of cities around the Great Lakes region, Evanston is experiencing a sad summer as Dutch elm disease claims dozens of trees more than half a century old and up to 70 feet tall.


Already more than one hundred Evanston elms have been found to have the killer fungus, and D’Agostino expects the toll to exceed two hundred. Once infected, a tree quickly begins to die…as the fungus blocks the vascular system that delivers water and nutrients to branches and leaves.


D’Agostino explains, standing near two dying elms in front of the Evanston Police Department…


“Both of these trees are in my estimation probably about 40 years old. These are pretty far along now in showing signs of disease…but the typical symptoms of yellowing and flagging leaves has now progressed to dead leaves and bare branches. We’ve got dying sucker growth along the main trunk which means the disease has spread into the main trunk and into the roots, so there’s no curing this tree at this point. The only way to solve this problem now is to remove the tree so it doesn’t spread to other nearby elms.”


(sound of sawing trees)


So five days a week, three crews of three men each are out on Evanston streets, taking down very old, very tall trees.


(sound of chain saw and crash)


For this relatively affluent, leafy suburb defined by its generous trees, the return of Dutch elm disease brings back bad memories of summers nearly 30 years ago, when hundreds of trees were cut down, destroying the canopies of tree tops that shade many of Evanston’s streets.


Still, there are 27,000 trees on city property in Evanston, and D’Agostino estimates three times that many on private property.


Today the suburb’s green and shade is created by a careful mix of hybrids and hardier trees, including Kentucky coffee, linden, gingko, honey locust and horse chestnut.


And the city is moving ahead with plans to continue replanting with diverse species to avoid future epidemics.


But ever a hotbed of activism, Evanston environmentalists of every stripe are on the case, badgering officials to do more than just identify and remove diseased trees.


Many want the city to inoculate the elms against the fungus.


“I’m a conservative republican, not at all a tree hugger. Al Gore and I would not mix ”


Virginia Mann has successfully organized the 13 other homeowners on her block to foot the bill to inject the elms on their street.


There are nine healthy elms on the block, and Mann and her neighbors have decided to adopt and inject three trees each year, at a cost of about $600 per tree.


“I know they add value to my community, I know they add value to my property, and I
know they keep my cooling costs down and I know there’s nothing I can do to replace them. So if you don’t take care of them, that’s it, they’re gone.”


While prognosis for the inoculated trees is excellent, there are no guarantees.
Dutch elm disease is spread both by beetles who carry the fungus on their hairs, and through root grafts between neighboring trees.


There is no way to protect the trees from root grafts. No one is sure why the disease is back and moving so aggressively.


Some citizens say, though inoculations can’t guarantee saving a tree, with only about 3,000 elms left in Evanston they’d rather try, than accept what the city officials seem to believe is the inevitable demise of the species in their suburb.
“Well, you can see my tree suffered an amputation this year.”


Mimi Peterson’s front porch on Ashland Avenue is shaded by a tall sturdy-looking survivor.


“It’s one of the few elms left on the block. You can also see across the street where we lost a really huge one. We’ve already lost nine trees on the block.”


She is well known in town for raising her voice as an advocate for trees; five years ago she hounded the city into more routine tree trimmings.


Now Peterson’s spearheading a group called TREE…To Rescue Evanston Elms, looking to suburbs like nearby Hinsdale…a place with more elm trees and a more aggressive Dutch elm disease prevention program.


Peterson says she agrees that diseased trees should go…but more needs to be done to protect still healthy elms.


Mostly Peterson’s group wants the city to spend more time and money looking for trees to save rather than trees to cut.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jody Becker.