Cancer Cure in Sea
pp. 42-43 · Read in the full issue
Western Samoa
Miracle drugs from the ocean. By DAVID S. NORTH.
THOUSANDS of marine creatures, including hundreds from Western Samoa, are being studied by an in ternational team of scientists looking for a cure for cancer and for other medical advances.
Based in Apia, a team of four New Zea land scuba divers went down to depths of 30 metres off the shores of Upolu search ing for sponges, corals and tunicates (a small marine animal) whicfrmight be used by medical science. They brought back more than 200 different items.
The four-man team was headed by Chris Battershill, who has just completed his Ph.D in Zoology after writing a dis sertation on the taxonomy and ecology of sponges.
Battershill and his associates, working with Western Samoan fisheries officials, were taking part in a world-wide seach for marine organisms with interesting medi cal properties. While they were skin-div ing their colleagues elsewhere in the world were collecting roughly comparable orga nisms with the help of manned minisubs
and deep diving robotic devices.
Once the samples have been gathered they are either frozen or freeze-dried. Back in the laboratories scientists mix extracts from the samples with cancer tumor cells, and then use microscopes to see if the ex tracts impede the growth of the tumors. If they do, the pertinent chemical com pounds are drawn from the extracts, and wider experiments are tried on animals. If successful, the new compounds are tested on humans a long, expensive, needle in-the-haystack approach. Similar meth ods are used to test the collected speci mens for other medical uses.
A promising prospect for fighting can cer comes from an obscure sponge found off the coast of New Zealand. According to Dr William Blunt, a Reader in Chem istry at Canterbury University, NZ, a compound drawn from the sponge is giv ing cause for optimism in the treatment of four human cancers, including lung and colon cancers. The sponge is so obscure that it lacks a scientific name and Dr Blunt, so as not to give rival researchers a
lead, declined to describe it further.
The sea is increasingly being seen as a fertile source of new drugs. Nature has created an immense variety of living crea tures, many of which have armed them selves with unique defensive chemical mixes; it apparently is easier to screen ex isting compounds, such as those in the sea, than to create new ones in the laboratory.
With this in mind, the National Cancer Institute in Washington is spending mil lions of dollars on several maritime col lection operations designed to find and test compounds in the sea. Both Canterbury University, which sent scientist-divers to Western Samoa, and Captain Cook Uni versity, in Townsville in Queensland, have grants to do this work.
Once a likely compound has been lo cated it is turned over to an American firm, SeaPharm Inc., of Princeton, New Jersey, for further development. SeaPharm is conducting the animal tests of the mys terious New Zealand sponge, and sorting through the materials collected in Western Samoa.
Dr Blunt’s Canterbury team is plan ning to spend more time in the islands over the next few years, and is also thinking about doing some collecting in Antarctica. □