Humanitys health may rely on what sits on the Arctic seabed
Strange and undiscovered life in the frigid seas of the north could be vital to our future well-being. David Wolman went out on a boat off the coast of Norway to find out why.
David Wolman
Marine biologist Richard Ingebrigtsen kneels to tip and then shake the heavy net, sending an avalanche of scallops, seaweed, algae, sea cucumbers, sponges, starfish, tiny shrimp, and shell fragments tumbling into a black plastic tub. There is even a spider crab, called hyas in Norwegian.
We are off the coast of Northern Norway, far above the Arctic Circle, and although it is early summer, the high peaks in the distance are blanketed with fresh snow. Little wonder Ingebrigtsen is decked out in winter gear. He examines todays catch as if every object contains a secret treasure and two red urchins catch his eye. Because these organisms are harder to come by, Ingebrigtsen places them in a separate bucket. Later, he will deliver them to a colleague who specialises in urchins and molecules derived from them. Hes going to be happy, says Ingebrigtsen. Maybe I can get one or two beers as payment.
Scientists are on the hunt for a different sort of bounty: chemistry that might just save your life
Despite the leisurely feel of this cruise, it has a serious mission. For centuries, people in this part of the world subsisted on protein-packed resources from the sea salmon, cod, halibut, whale. Fisheries (and oil) continue to provide the country with riches. But now scientists like Ingebrigtsen are on the hunt for a different sort of bounty: chemistry that might just save your life.
Humanity is facing an all-out emergency when it comes to the absence of new drugs. Antimicrobial resistance is fast becoming a scourge of our time, while the fight against unremitting killers like cancer and heart disease can always benefit from novel molecular weaponry. And thats just the start. Alzheimers, diabetes, pain medications and anti-viral medication we need it all, and more, not to mention new chemical tools for applications as varied as cosmetics and dairy products. All of which is to say that excursions like this one are about far more than the romance of cataloguing the natural world.
As a PhD candidate at the University of Tromso and a member of the Polar Research Centres biodiscovery program, Ingebrigtsen has been at the heart of this mission. Valuable stuff is out there, he says. But you have to look for it. As we talk, he picks up a scallop shell, attached to which is a bryozoan, that looks like a leafy crimson-coloured tree half an inch tall. Next he inspects something called a colonial sea squirt, an organism that is as charismatic as the contents of a used tissue.
Ingebrigtsens venture is part of a larger bioprospecting project that is attempting to chart the seas organisms (Credit: David Wolman)
Despite their unassuming appearance, creatures like these squirts, bryozoan, sponges, and microalgae show great promise for new drug development, because the molecules that evolution has equipped them with can be downright radical. How else are these stationary and otherwise defenseless creatures going to survive the dark, corrosive, turbulent conditions of the sea and incessant threats from predators? Theyve been floating around or stuck down there on the bottom for millions and millions of years, says Ingebrigtsen, marveling at another bryozoan as if it were a diamond. The solutions they have evolved to survive are wild, weird, mysterious and potentially quite useful.
And there is one other adaptation that squirts, sponges, microalgae and other creatures in the waters around Norway possess that is of particular interest to Ingebrigtsen and his colleagues, one that has made the waters of the far north a hotspot in the search for novel chemistry: they can handle the cold.
Natures pharmacy
Theres nothing new about looking to nature for useful goodies. Indeed, the story of human history could well be written by ticking through the various ways our ancestors and contemporaries figured out how to exploit natural resources to better our chances of survival, be it stone tools, firewood, fish, cows, or copper.
At every step in that journey, our ancestors have also turned to Mother Nature to heal the body; herbal medicine was a thing long before herbal medicine was ever a thing. More recently, biodiscovery programs in terrestrial environments have yielded or inspired many important medicines in use today. A common example: the chemotherapies docetaxel and paclitaxel, both derived from yew trees. Organisms from forests to deserts have revealed all kinds of secret chemistry, some of which have led to therapeutics, others of which have proven useful for everyday products like laundry detergent.
But in the latter half of the 20th Century, lab technology for synthesising chemistry became so powerful that most pharmaceutical companies turned their attention away from the natural world as a source for the next generation of great remedies. The thinking was that rapid and high-volume synthesis and screening of molecules would deliver a greater rate of successful hits, as compared with expensive expeditions out into nature to uncover new molecules cooked up by evolution.
That thinking was wrong. Despite all the investment in lab-based shotgun approaches, the majority of new drugs to enter the market over the last 40 years have their origins in the natural world. As former chief of the natural products branch at the National Cancer Institute in the US, David Newman, recently told Pharmaceutical Journal, Making something from nothing has failed miserably. For now, not even supercomputers can beat 3 billion years of evolution. Compounds gleaned from nature are so different from what a chemist can think of, its incalculable.
People often think that were the best at making things chemically and then we discover that nature has been there before
People often think that were the best at making things chemically and then we discover that nature has been there before, agrees Marcel Jaspars, professor of chemistry at the University of Aberdeen and Director Marine Biodiscovery Centre at Aberdeen and an advisor to the program in Tromso. You ask, Why wouldnt nature do this? And the answer is, it already did. We only just found it.
Even so, only a small part of bioprospecting takes place in the field, and the bulk of the hunt continues in the lab, where scientists screen and test the chemicals for so-called bioactivity. When you combine compounds derived from whatever species with cells associated with Alzheimers disease or cancer, say, do reactions happen? If so, what kind? Are they big, small, temperature-dependent? And what is the underlying chemical structure behind it all? Oftentimes, such reactions, and indeed the molecules that catalysed them, are already known to science. To date, there are an estimated 24,000 catalogued marine-derived molecules, give or take a few hundred. But sometimes molecules prove to be new and show enough promise that they are pushed forward into the drug development pipeline. BBC
