A new breed of prospector is hunting for buried treasure on the sea floor, this time looking for breakthrough drugs derived from the natural heritage of the world’s oceans. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography believe that this vast and unexplored region of San Diego, California, may hold medical treatments for a host of ailments, from infectious diseases to cancer.

From his seaside corner office overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Dr. William Fenical, director of the Scripps Centre for Marine Bio-technology, presides over a research facility that has discovered more micro-organisms in a single teaspoon of ocean water than there are trees in an entire rainforest. He believes they have the potential to save the lives of millions of people.

While most people don’t usually associate medical benefits with poisonous snails (anaesthetics) or prickly horseshoe crabs (insulin), traditional medicine has long recognised the healing power of naturally occurring substances found in the world’s ecosystems.

For example, the discovery of penicillin on slime moulds augured a medical revolution with the development of anti-biotics, saving countless lives since the mid-1940s. Indeed, as many as half of all new medicines developed are not synthetically generated in laboratories, but are instead derived from naturally occurring compounds discovered in the wild.

Currently there are 120 drugs on the market derived from chemical compounds found in nature. And herein lies the problem.

Scientists for decades have relied upon a narrow band of terrestrial life when three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered in water. And as habitats are lost to the buzz of chainsaws, so do opportunities for new drug discoveries diminish. Scripps scientists are now turning to the sea for chemically active compounds.

“The ocean represents a major frontier for bio-medical research. The vast numbers of genetically diverse organisms found in the sea provide an almost unlimited potential for new drug discoveries,” Dr. Fenical said. Of the 37 diverse phyla of life, only 17 occur on land, yet 34 occur in the ocean and the largest proportion of biodiversity exists in the ocean.

There are an estimated 10 million unique organisms living in the sea, and there can be as many as one thousand plant and animal species occupying one cubic yard of water. During the past 20 years, approximately 12,000 novel compounds have been isolated from marine organisms for a variety of commercial applications from superglues to cosmetics.

In recent years, Dr. Fenical and his team of scientists have been exploring the ocean floor, looking for bio-active compounds in US territorial water and investigating natural resources. Equipped with glorified spring loaded ice-cream scoopers, they harvest nutrient-rich ooze from the primordial ocean bottom, searching for microscopic organisms containing chemical compounds that form the building blocks of drug science research in laboratories.

Dr. Fenical sees a vast untapped medical potential for marine microbes, envisioning new opportunities for exploring the genetic diversity of marine life through DNA sequencing that could eventually lead to unprecedented discoveries of new classes of drugs essential to the fight against cancer. — IPS