Scientists Search Deep Sea Reefs for Wonder Drugs 144
ScienceDaily is reporting that a team of scientists will be venturing some 2000-3000 feet below the ocean surface in order to explore deep-sea reefs discovered last December. From the article: "A primary goal of the upcoming expedition, which is funded largely by the State of Florida's 'Florida Oceans Initiative,' will be to search for marine organisms that produce chemical compounds with the potential to treat human diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's."
Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern man has an impeccable record for destroying the natural environment that produces his fruits & resources. Then we sit and bitch about how it went away. Reefs are probably going to be no different. They're harder to get at, but if the run-off doesn't destroy them, I'm sure our medical companies will [eurekalert.org].
There's a report [unu.edu] written by the UN University that details the problems being raised by this treasure of "blue gold." One of the interesting sources it cites is Blue Genes: Sharing and Conserving the World's Aquatic Biodiversity [www.idrc.ca] (another interesting document on the global problem of sharing the world's oceans).
Hypothetical scenario time! So, Pfizer's scientists find that a fairly common sponge produces a natural chemical that slows the growth of cancer. Unfortunately, each sponge only produces an ounce of this chemical when refined and there is no way to naturally synthesize it on a mass scale. Pfizer tries to buy the rights to harvest the sponge at a restricted rate in Florida. But they have to get permits from the local, state & federal governments and it costs them a lot of money because they send people down to the reef to hand pick the sponges. Instead, they find a supplier in a third world country (possibly around Indonesia) that promises them mass quantities of the sponge at a reduced rate. Now, the government there forbids it too but an official receives a large sum from this company and suddenly Pfizer has got incoming shipments of the sponge. The problem is that the company working for Pfizer is doing so with total blatant disregard for the ecosystem & probably its workers.
A farfetched scenario? Or something that's happened so often in the past, we'd be naïve to imagine it to stop here?
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:3, Informative)
Here is a lab that does this.
http [umich.edu]
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:4, Informative)
Synthesized in-vitro on a commercial scale? Look at Taxol [wikipedia.org]. It took over 20 years to design a commercially viable synthesis method.
Galanthamine? [wikipedia.org] To my knowledge, no commercially viable method exists.
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2, Insightful)
Taxol, BMS, and NCI (Score:2)
I noticed the wiki article on Taxol doesn't mention that Bristol-Myers Squibb paid the NCI, National Institute of Cancer, less than the NCI spent developing Taxol. Having paid little for the rights to exclusive use of the Taxol data, MBS has made billions of dollars off of Taxol.
FalconRe:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:5, Interesting)
Should be != is. Particularly since development of the process for complex compunds can be extrmely expensive.
"Any protein can be cloned and synthesized en masse."
Protein folding is still a tricky business for a lot of proteins, and not necessarily reproducible in a lab. Plus, you've got to isolate the gene(s) responsible for the protein production, successfully insert them into bacteria or yeast to produce a viable colony, and then ferment them. By no means automatic. It's not a simple matter of 'cloning' a protein.
Cost is also a huge issue. As the GP alludes to, the availability of a cheap supply will often preclude synthetic production -- regardless of whether that supply is truly cheap in the long run (i.e., in his example, the public value of the reefs/natural sponges in the environment is not included in the cost equation for the drug company).
Sure, as the natural supply becomes more limited, it gets more expensive, and synthesis of the compound becomes an economically viable alternative for the company. But in the meanwhile, overharvesting of a natural resource can have pretty dire consequences.
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
- A friendly neighborhood molecular biologist
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
So really, the bigger concern should be how to produce non-peptide drugs, which are not always so easy t
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
This statement is categorically untrue. Tamiflu is made from an element of Chinese star anise. [wikipedia.org] Are you surprised by the fact that 90% of the Chinese star anise in the world is used to make Tamiflu? Imagine if Chinese star anise is rarer than i
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
The same Wikipedia article says that a complete synthesis protocol was developed this year. Like for Taxol, it took a while but proved possible. And happened much faster than Taxol, probably showing the effect of improving organic chemistry science and tools.
I fin
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
"Although it is produced in most autotrophic organisms, star anise is the industrial source of shikimic acid, a primary ingredient used to create the anti-flu drug Tamiflu. Tamiflu is regarded as the most promising drug to mitigate the severity of bird flu (H5N1); however, reports indicate that some forms of the virus have already adapted to Tamiflu.
A shortage of star anise is one of the key reasons why there is a worldwide shortage of Tamiflu (as of 200
pharmaceutical research (Score:2)
I find it surprising, though, that both syntheses came out of academic labs - not from the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs. You'd think they'd have enormous incentive, and more than enough resources, to do such work themselves. If they aren't interested in actually making drugs, what exactly is it that they do?
It's cheaper for the pharmaceutical companies to let government and univserities to do the research then to come in and buy the drug. Taxol, a cancer drug previously mentioned, is a g
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
this should be referenced to a web site where others can find it.
I am very glad to here that an oil company exec. is willing to commit to the thinking that the global warming issue is real. if anything, this might guild funds to better long term resource usages.
Onepoint
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:1)
This google thing actually seems to work...
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
Eat more chicken!
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
If Mother Nature Keeps Fucking Us... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Oceans lash our coasts. Deserts Burn. The sky provides no shelter. Turmoil of Biblical proportions threatens not just our weather but life itself."
Don't those sound like great reasons to fight back?
In all seriousness I feel totally out of the loop on global warming, but Al Gore's scaremongering movie makes me think the current attitude is exaggerated. I believe that there is truth to global warming, but I am starting to disbelieve anything that threatens impending doom (this inc
Re:If Mother Nature Keeps Fucking Us... (Score:2)
"Oh, so mother nature needs a favor? Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys." -Monty Burns
Seriously, you missed a perfectly good Simpsons quote?
What kind of Slashdotter are you?
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:3, Informative)
http://magic-city-news.com/article_5888.shtml [magic-city-news.com]
All this in light of yesterdays article about plagerism [slashdot.org].
State of Fear? (Score:2)
Agree with Crighton or not, he cites his sources in the book, which is more than I can say for most of the GW scaremongering I've ever seen. Usually it's just "[experts|scientists] [say|warn]", which bothers the shit out of me.
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm the last person to make apologies for some company, but I'd like to think they're probably smart enough to not kill the golden goose. If they're making billions of dollars from reef extracts, it wouldn't do them any good to destroy the reef and lose that potential source of profits.
Of course, I could be wrong.. they could decide that they'll destroy the reef at a rate
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
In my own back yard, we've got another classic. For the last 10-15 years, scientists have been telling the EU that cod stocks in the
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
I think you're dead-on. Having worked with large-company execs (and wannabe-execs) I can tell that
the amount of greed and sheer ignorance that it apparently takes to get into such a position and the resulting ruthlessness should not be underestimated.
The droids that I was unfortunate to deal with were kind of mindlocke
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:3, Interesting)
Pacific Yew tree (Score:2)
Your entire fifth paragraph falls apart logically. Use the northwestern yew as an example. Extremely rare species which supplies a useful anticancer compound. Were they harvested to extinction? No. Were they replaced by other yews from around the world? No. Why? It is that species which has the compound. Your paragraph falls apart historically. Which, ironically, is the very rational you use to promote it. Odd, that.
Actually a species of the yew tree has been found to at least augment if not replace the
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:1, Insightful)
They are 2-3km deep -- coastal runoff is largely irrelevant, and they aren't going to be hand-collected by divers.
On the more negative side, the life at these locations probably grows very, very, very slowly (low temperature, low nutrient supply), and would be easy to damage or destroy. However, ordinary fishing operations in the vicinity of these deep sea reefs already do *immense* damage in some parts of the worl
Curse of the Depleted Environment (Score:2)
What is amazing is that even as modern man harvests his latest wonder drugs from the environment, he simultaneously wrecks it by (1) dumping chemicals into the seas, (2) burning the rain forests, etc.
One of the key forces spurring the destruction of the environment is population growth. Expanding populations need living space: in a battle between human popu
Sierra Club and immigration (Score:2)
One of the key forces spurring the destruction of the environment is population growth. Expanding populations need living space: in a battle between human population and mother nature, the human population always wins. Indeed, Consider the recent attempt [usatoday.com] to add immigration-control to the platform of the Sierra Club: immigration-control would curb the population growth of the United States. The attempt completely failed because no one cares about the environmental destruction that population
Re:Curse of the Blue Gold (Score:2)
Cancer (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Cancer (Score:3, Informative)
Are you sure? Disease [reference.com]:
Re:Disease (Score:1)
Re:Cancer (Score:1)
Nice to hear from you again!
I can tell that you're an anti-mac bigot, who's just trying to bait me. Why don't you get an account, log in & we can discuss your anti-mac agenda?
Re:Cancer (Score:1)
Take it down a notch man... He (or she) was likely just joking...
And yeah us daily posters are sick in the head... did that come as a shock to you?
If cancer isn't a disease, then the reason is... (Score:1)
The damage to the p53 can, amongst other things, be caused by disease.
Human Papilloma Virus (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you'd be surprised. Nothing gets into your cells and screws up your DNA like a virus.
Have you heard of HPV (Human Papilloma Virus)? It's a very-common (family) of sexually-transmitted viruses. We've known for a long time that certain types of HPV are the cause of cervical and ovarian cancer in women and testicular cancer in men (e.g.: these cancers are STDs), and more recent research has shown that HPV is also linked to certain forms of skin cancer.
In other words: Yes, cancer can be and often is caused by infectious diseases!
Re:Human Papilloma Virus (Score:2)
You can read more about HPV and cancer here:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk
Hopefully, it won't be like... (Score:1, Insightful)
The rainforest(s).
Lots of potential, but wasted.
This is pretty common, actually (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is pretty common, actually (Score:2)
If someone were to do a cost analysis on this, I'm betting they could fund several, if not tens of similar projects on dry land. Having said that, it's not likely you will get shot or kidnapped while searching in the depths of the ocean as oppose to wandering about in the jungles
Re:This is pretty common, actually (Score:2, Insightful)
As much as I applaud my colleagu
Re:This is pretty common, actually (Score:2)
These types of bioassays are the ultimate in crap shoots - there is no specific reason to suspect that brain coral just happens to secrete a substance that treats brain cancer. We're just looking for all sorts of oddly shaped proteins and hoping that one of them fits a receptor somewhere. It's just as likely that we'd
Re:This is pretty common, actually (Score:2)
Once in a blue moon, it does work. Search PubMed for "ecteinascidin" or "Et-743". The compound was isolated from pureed Caribbean sea squirt, and is showing great promise for hard-to-treat sarcomas.
On the other hand, that's the only example that comes easily to mind.
Sea Exploration (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sea Exploration (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sea Exploration (Score:2, Interesting)
After that, in 1953, a Swiss explorer, Auguste Piccard, made a record shattering dive to almost 7 miles. This vessel, the Trieste, was sponsored by the U.S. Navy. A
Re:Sea Exploration (Score:2)
Re:Sea Exploration (Score:2)
Deep ocean research, like the space program, is tremendously expensive. (and like the space program, robots have made it significantly cheaper/safer.) And both programs have the problem that the average joe can't really participate beyond monetary support: It takes a very lot of money to support even a few scientists.
Astronomy on the other hand has the benefit of an army of amateur astronomers with
Re:Sea Exploration (Score:2)
Sound eerily like you not only don't have a clue, but lack the wit to use Google as well.
Hasn't happened with with oceanography - or space. What has happened is that both have become common enough that it's no longer 'sexy'.
Re:Sea Exploration (Score:2)
How did this nonsense get modded insightful? Even a minute o
Odd. . . (Score:3, Funny)
Odder Yet... (Score:2)
In an octopus' garden in the shade
He'd let us in, knows where we've been
In his octopus' garden in the shade " (emphasis mine)
Funny, it's the YRO articles about the NSA that make me think of Octopus' Garden.
Re:Odd. . . (Score:2)
Reef Etiquette (Score:4, Informative)
It takes 30,000 years to grow 1 cubic inch of coral, and the mistreatment of the reefs around Florida (1960s dynamite fishing, jewelry harvesting, etc.) has made it so that the reef off of the Florida Keys is the last living coral reef in the region.
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:1, Interesting)
As an ex-marine aquarist (I stopped when I found out that 99% of the animals are from the wild! Don't let some pet-store schmuck tell you otherwise), I've placed a few corals in my tank. The ones that are sold in stores are hardy enough to have
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:5, Interesting)
Source?
I thought it was more like 1/2 inch per year
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:2)
Ahem, sorry, (I'm not used to working in British imperial units, they're so old fashioned!)
I should have said 1/20th inch per year
(around 13mm, I lost a zero converting)
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:1)
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:2)
*snort* you're right *sighs* Where the hell did I leave my brain this afternoon.
Just goes to show, we should get rid of those units & get everyone on to metric asap!
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:2)
Incorrect. Reread the thread.
The gp thought he'd overestimated the growth rates, not underestimated.
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:4, Informative)
LOL (Score:1, Troll)
Classic.
Re:LOL (Score:2)
NOAA [noaa.gov]?
Re:LOL (Score:2)
A week's not complete without at least one downmod on slashdot.
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:2)
Fair enough
Some species of coral grow only a millimeter per year, and even quick sprouters add less than an inch. [enn.com]
From my memory it was 13 millimeters. But I was wrong (that was one species only)
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:1)
Re:Reef Etiquette (Score:2)
. . . that's a confusing statistic for something that is inherently parallel in nature. It could take 30,000 years to grow 1 cubic inch of coral, and next to it another cubic inch of coral, and then you could say it takes 30,000 years to grow 2 cubic inches of coral. I mean, more than 1 cubic inch of coral grows every 30k years. Is that 1 cubic inch built up per square inch of area? Then it should be phrased differently, probably as 1 inch of thickness
Florida Keys (Score:2)
It takes 30,000 years to grow 1 cubic inch of coral, and the mistreatment of the reefs around Florida (1960s dynamite fishing, jewelry harvesting, etc.) has made it so that the reef off of the Florida Keys is the last living coral reef in the region.
Ah, Key Largo's an excellent place for scuba diving. While it's not done in the Keys now, dynamite fishing is done frequently in the Indian Ocean. That and the use of cyanide. Shark finning is also popular, especially for shark fin soup.
Falcon
Humans are not that unique in the world (Score:3, Insightful)
The production of antibiotics by fungi and other bacteria to reduce the population of competing organisms has been honed by centuries of evolution. If preserved, supported and studied the processes, and the compounds are there to be used.
The science is slow and tedious, but many of the cultures that live in these rich habitats are well versed in the properties of the flora they have around them.
Are you on the endangered ideologies' list? : ) (Score:2)
Wow! A young-earth evolutionist!
Cancer and Alzheimer's... or.. (Score:2)
Reefs (Score:2, Insightful)
How can we be expected to destroy them if we don't know where they are? Let's put more money into hunting down these "reef" things so we can pit-mine them for a solution to athlete's foot.
Or, maybe we can just leave them the hell alone. How about it scientists? Just a thought.
Re:Reefs (Score:2)
Most likely, as the natural product needs to be modified before being an effective pharmaceutical, the compounds of interest will be identified. Then either the necessary gene sequence will be cloned into a workhorse organism, such as yeast or E. coli, or retrosynthetic techniques will be used to make the compound and derivatives thereof under abiotic conditions.
T
Re:Reefs (Score:1)
Try vinegar 1 cup per gallon water. Soak feet for a good while. Spray a little in the shoe if you can't wash the shoes. If you can wash the shoes then use bleach and a little vinegar in the wash.
Oh... and always buy shoes that are on the top shelf and have not been tried on by an "athlete!"
PS. If you have a problem with "athletes foot" then please "GO TO THE SHOE STORE WITHOUT YOUR SHOES ON!" BUY CLEAN SOCKS BEFORE TRYING ON NEW SHOES! Use the above remedy to help with you
Depths can't be right. (Score:2, Interesting)
For those that don't know, sunlight doesn't penetrate into the depths. It is noticeably dimmer at 120 feet (an approximate limit for sport SCUBA divers.) and it is quite dark at 300 feet. No light whatsoever r
Re:Depths can't be right. (Score:1)
Not the First Time (Score:1)
"New Underwater Imaging Vehicle Maps
Scientists Search Deep Sea Reefs for Wonder Drugs (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Scientists Search Deep Sea Reefs for Wonder Dr (Score:1)
With rainforests gone, we'll NEED to look harder (Score:2)
Once the rainforests are gone, discovering these chemicals and constituants will get much tougher and many drugs simply wont be invented. Reefs may help produce some drugs, but the article i
Re:With rainforests gone, we'll NEED to look harde (Score:2)
In other news, cleaning my counter with bleach could kill microbes which produce the cure for obsessive compulsive disorder.
There are unumerable (well, we'll call it 10^30 or
Re:With rainforests gone, we'll NEED to look harde (Score:2)
Your kitchen surface is not likely to produce chemicals useful for drugs either mainly because their not surviving in a niche enviroment. Rainforests for example contain lots of good candidate chemicals because trillions of different types of organisms live in often carefully etched out niche's where funky chemical processes
This is always a needle in haystack deal.... (Score:3, Interesting)
This strikes me as the same thing, only in the ocean rather than on land. Exploring is all well and good, but if there's sufficient risk of doing major damage to the landscape - it seems like the negatives outweigh the lottery-winning like chances of finding a benefit from it.
Sealab 2021 (Score:1)
Notice to all sea sponges: Don't panic (Score:5, Informative)
DiscoveryHD program on the reef (Score:2, Interesting)
Inside joke alert! (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
Why not search the Sahara desert or the
moon or the African jungle or something?
Why the deep sea reef?
Re:Why? (Score:1)
It is most likely that there are other groups studying the life of the Sahara desert and African jungles, however, it is most unlikely that studying biodiversity on the moon will turn up much that is useful. (As far as we know, there is no life there!) More fruitful for the moon would be a search for life at all. Once we find it, then we can study it.
When search
Okay so what about this... (Score:2)
Soooo... in addition to searching deep sea reefs, how about putting various kinds of cancer cells into competition with fungi and bacteria until some develop randomly that kill the cancer. Then see what they did to achieve that.
It might be cheaper.
OrgWHAT? (Score:2)
I was much more interested in the article until I re-read that sentence.
NO MORE NEW DRUGS!!! (Score:1, Troll)
OH! (Score:1)
So THATS where the term "reefer" comes from!
Re:OH! (Score:1)
"Reefer cures cancer !"
Re:Yadda yadda... (Score:1)