Amy Wright, Harbor Branch director, collects samples from the sponge she thinks could be a cancer cure (Photo Net News)
Posted on 11/03/2003 4:11:18 PM PST by nickcarraway
After a 20-year search, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution scientists on an expedition to the Bahamas that covered some 1300 miles have discovered the hideout of a mystery sponge that harbors a chemical with a remarkable ability to kill cancer cells in laboratory tests.
In 1984, exploring deep waters off the Bahamas in one of the institution’s submersibles Harbor Branch scientists discovered a small piece of sponge that contained a chemical with a remarkable ability to kill cancer cells in laboratory tests.
Despite almost two decades of searching, the group was never able to find enough of the sponge to fully explore its potential. But now that process can finally begin because, thanks to some creative detective work, the team has found the animal’s secret hiding place and collected enough of it to support years of intense research.
“It’s just amazing,” says Amy Wright, director of Harbor Branch Biomedical Marine Research, of the sponge she has been on a career-long quest to find. “This is our next cure, I know it’s our next cure.”
A chemical produced within the sponge, which has not yet been given an official name, has proven in one test of cancer-fighting potential to be about 400 times more potent than Taxol®, a widely used treatment for breast and other forms of cancer. As important, preliminary experiments have also shown the compound to be fairly non-toxic to normal cells.
If the chemical continues to show promise as the research process progresses, it would eventually be licensed to a pharmaceutical company, which would take the compound through clinical trials. A key step before that could happen would be for Harbor Branch and its collaborators to develop a method to sustainably produce the chemical without having to collect it from wild sponges, which would be both economically and ecologically unfeasible.
The full process of turning the chemical into a commercially available cancer treatment would likely take more than a decade. Discodermolide, a compound produced by a deepwater sponge found in the Bahamas, is currently in the first phase of human trials as a cancer treatment. Caribbean Net News
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