Episode Transcript
Interviewer: Searching Ocean Life for New Therapeutics, up next on The Scope.
Announcer: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs. The Science and Research show is on the Scope.
Interviewer: I'm talking with Dr. Eric Schmidt, Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Utah. Dr. Schmidt you search ocean life for secrets to new therapeutics. What exactly are you hoping to find?
Dr. Schmidt: One of our major focus areas in the last few years has been compounds that act on neurons, for examples compounds that might be useful in pain or in other neurological conditions. We have also looked for compounds that might find some use in cancer or anti-infected agents.
Interviewer: Why are these agents lurking in ocean life?
Dr Schmidt: You think of all these diverse creates sitting on the ocean floor that look very edible. We work with things that are sponges or they're a lot of organisms that are like sponges in some way that are soft and squishy.
Fish really want to eat them, starfish want to eat them, lots of things want to come in and eat those animals. And they need something that defends them that keeps them alive. And those compounds have been sitting there in those organisms evolving to protect them over a long period of time.
For many of these compounds that are interesting it's not that the animals themselves are making them. But they've established very precise, long term relationships with bacteria. And that's kind of like what you're hearing about with the human microbiome with bacteria living in humans that are important to us. All animals have them and in the tropical Pacific bacteria live with the animals and they produce toxic compounds that used by the animals for their defense.
Interviewer: Why would an organism have an anti-cancer agent in it?
Dr. Schmidt: So the organism is obviously not concerned with cancer, but for example, in a compound that might be useful in treating cancer maybe a very toxic against a certain type of bio-chemical process in a fish, for example. And that compound may be useful to target a similar process in humans that leads to killing cancer cells.
Interviewer: Sounds like a nice way to make a living diving in the tropics.
Dr. Schmidt: Well I wish life were like that. But in reality we go somewhere every three or four years for a week. And then our requirements are fulfilled for a few years.
Lately we've been working with collaborates in the Philippines, and we've got samples from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji. We try to pick places to go where we know the chemistry going to be really good. And so that tends to be in a center of the Tropical Pacific that's the most bio-diverse area on earth, at least in the oceans.
And another really important aspect is that you need to do everything ethically and legally with the country that you're interacting with. And so that's a huge part of the consideration, can we find the right partners to do things correctly.
Interviewer: Once you get these, collect these sponges then the bacteria that are on them. What do you do next?
Dr. Schmidt: So we do a couple of different things. One of them is that we look at what compounds, what chemicals are there. And we work with lots of people to see how they could be used and applied to medicine.
We're working with a few different things that we're excited about that have led to patent applications that we're further developing in the areas of pain primarily. We've got one that's with Lou Barrows' group at the U that is active against tuberculosis that we've been working on. So lots of interesting things coming up.
Interviewer: I think another interesting aspect of your work that you mentioned is that you're kind of looking at also the recipe for making these different compounds.
Dr. Schmidt: That's the major focus that we've been doing lately, is that we've been looking at how we can redirect those recipes to make different drugs, to make new compounds, to design things that are made by bacteria.
So you can modify something that maybe could be useful for cancer but it's too toxic generally for example and improve its properties. Or you can also make whole new materials that are previously unimagined.
Interviewer: Could quantity be an issue though? Could it be hard to get enough?
Dr. Schmidt: Quantity is absolutely an issue. So a good example there is you could picture if you found something in an exotic animal on a coral reef somewhere, you would not want to go in with the vacuum cleaner and clean that organism off the reef. What you would want is you want to build it in the lab in an environmentally friendly way.
And so a big part of what we think about is supply. How do we scale up that production so you could actually make enough to do something useful.
Interviewer: So if you can make it within a bacteria that can live and grow in the lab then you can get a big enough supply.
Dr. Schmidt: Yes, and so we've got examples where we've gone from a very small amount of natural materials to enough to do pre-clinical studies using those methods.
Interviewer: You know I think this is sort of drug discovery has been going on for a little while. How successful has this approach been?
Dr. Schmidt: I would say it's been fairly successful, I mean even today about of quarter new drugs that are approve are coming from natural sources.
Interviewer: Oh, that many.
Dr. Schmidt: Yeah. And overall about depending on who you believe of about half of all drugs are inspired by original discoveries coming from nature. So I think it's still a very successful source. The hard parts about it you touched on one of them; supply scaling up, holds back this field is one thing we're really interested in improving. But it's still very successful field of endeavor.
Announcer: Examining the latest research, and telling you about the latest breakthroughs. The Science and Research Show is on The Scope.