MANDE HOLFORD: “What I’d like to say is that the snails produce sort of a cluster bomb. Inside of each venom you have between fifty to two hundred different peptides. And all of those peptides target something major along the nervous system. One thing that they hit is a pain signal. When they silence the pain signal, the prey doesn’t go into fight or flight mode.”
The fish stays calm, even while it is being eaten. Chemists already have had one major success using the peptides – a drug called Prialt eases pain for HIV and cancer patients.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: David Newman directs the Natural Products Branch of America’s National Cancer Institute. After years of collecting organisms on land, his team now collects only sea life, including sponges and corals. Because these organisms cannot move, he says, they depend on chemical warfare.
DAVID NEWMAN: “I have been known to say that weapons of mass destruction are alive and well on a coral reef, if you happen to be a fellow sponge who’s trying to encroach on someone’s territory or you’re a starfish that’s trying to eat the sponge. These are extremely toxic agents because of the dilution effect of seawater.”
Such strong chemicals are inviting to any group that is looking for ways to kill cancer cells. Far below coral reefs lie what could be an even more promising source of new medicines: mud. Close to seventy percent of the surface of the earth is really deep, ocean mud says William Fenical. He directs the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Scripps Institute for Oceanography in California. His team looks for microorganisms living on the sea floor.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25