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| A marine sponge of the genus Theonella. Photo by Nick Hobgood. |
We rely on
natural products in medicine: the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs are
thus of plant or microbial origin. (The purely synthetic drugs, which have no
counterparts in the environment, are the exception rather than the rule.) To
name potent examples of natural products, take antibiotics (discovered in fungi
and bacteria), the anti-malaria drug artemisinin (isolated from sweet wormwood)
or simply aspirin (salicylic acid is present in willow bark). Many people, I
think, forget about this, as they oppose a so-called ‘natural’ medicine to a ‘chemical’
medicine (the pills you get from your doctor).
It is not
easy to find new active compounds, however, and much more difficult to test
them and turn them into a real medicine. The situation doesn’t look that good,
notably because of the high increase of antibiotic-resistant strains of
bacteria, and the paucity of new drugs available. A natural environment that
has long been recognized as a promising source of new chemicals is the largest
on Earth—oceans—, and many researchers are mining the sea in search of new
organisms and their specific biochemical abilities. For instance, the research
project PharmaSea, funded by the European Union, was launched in 2013 with the
goal of discovering new microbial organisms that could be the source of useful chemicals
for medicine or industry. This team of academics and industry researchers plan
to explore the deep bottom of the sea, looking for environments that are poorly
known and potentially harbor interesting organisms. Here’s an excerpt from the project
website:
“Marine organisms that live more than 6,000 meters below the sea level are considered to be an interesting source of novel bioactive compounds as they survive under extreme conditions. "Trenches are separated from each other and represent islands of diversity. They are not connected to each other and life has evolved differently in each one", explains Marcel Jaspars [PharmaSea project leader]. “
PharmaSea is an
ambitious project, and it may not be easy at all to get many new products out
of it, but the goal has to be praised, as we surely are in need of new
biochemicals, particularly new antibiotics.
