Reference News Network March 8 report According to AFP on March 3, some scientists sent divers to the sea on speedboats, some sent submersible robots to search the seabed, and a team deployed "mud missiles" - all of these methods are used by scientists to find the next effective cancer treatment or antibiotic in the world's oceans.

The report said that they hope to find some kind of medicinal molecule in microorganisms dug out from the sediments, produced by porous sponges or sea squirts (barrel-shaped organisms attached to rocks or the bottom of ships) or bacteria that live in symbiosis with snails.

The report pointed out that once a compound shows potential to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's disease or epilepsy, it usually takes a decade or more and costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop it into a drug.

"Suppose you want to treat cancer - how do you know what to study?" said William Finicourt, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the United States, who is regarded as a pioneer in the search for marine drugs.

Due to tight budgets and little support from large pharmaceutical companies, scientists often need to hitchhike on other research expeditions, the report said.

Marcel Jaspers of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland said colleagues collected samples by placing a large metal tube on a 5,000-meter-long cable to "hit" the seabed. A more sophisticated method is to use a small remotely controlled underwater vehicle.

"I tell people that all I really want is a tube of mud," he told reporters.

Daniel Kaherlis, who participated in the UN High Seas Treaty negotiations on behalf of the High Seas Alliance, said that countries have long been arguing over how to share marine genetic resources in the high seas, including compounds used in drugs, bioplastics and food stabilizers.

However, he said, only a few products containing marine genetic resources have been able to enter the market, such as only 7 in 2019. Potential royalties are estimated at $10 million to $30 million a year.

But the ocean's vast biodiversity means there's probably more to discover.

"The more we explore, the more we find," said Jaspers, whose lab specializes in compounds from the world's extreme environments, such as underwater hydrothermal vents and polar regions.

Since Alexander Fleming discovered an antibacterial mold in 1928 that he called penicillin, researchers have been studying and synthesizing compounds made primarily by land plants, animals, insects and microbes to treat human diseases.

"The vast majority of antibiotics and anticancer drugs come from nature," Finicar told reporters. When he began his research in 1973, he said, people were skeptical about what the ocean had to offer.

In an early breakthrough in the mid-1980s, Finicar and his colleagues discovered that a sea whip, a soft coral that grows on a reef in the Bahamas, produces a molecule with anti-inflammatory properties. But the amount of sea whips needed to study and sell the products eventually led Finical to abandon marine animals and focus on microbes.

Researchers scoop sediment from the seafloor and grow the microbes they find in the lab. In 1991, Finical and his colleagues discovered a previously unknown marine bacterium called Salinosporium in the mud off the coast of the Bahamas. More than a decade of research and development led them to two cancer drugs, one for lung cancer and the other with promise for treating the intractable brain tumor glioblastoma. Both are in the final stages of clinical trials.

Finical, 81, still runs a lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He says researchers are excited to have made it this far, but that excitement is mixed with caution.

"You never know if something is going to work or not," he says.

Carmen Cuevas Marchant, head of research and development at Spanish biotech company Marine Drugs, is no stranger to this.

To develop their first drug, the researchers first cultivated and collected about 300 tons of globular sea squirts. "From a ton of globular sea squirts, we could only isolate less than a gram" of the compound needed for clinical trials, she told reporters.

The company now has three approved anti-cancer drugs extracted from sea squirts, and has fine-tuned its methods for making synthetic versions of natural compounds.

Marchant said that even if all goes well, it may take 15 years from the discovery of a compound to the market.

Overall, according to statistics, since 1969, there have been 17 marine-derived drugs approved for the treatment of human diseases, and about 40 drugs are in various stages of clinical trials around the world.

Alejandro Maier, a professor of pharmacology at Midwestern University in Illinois, said there are "countless" early studies on marine-derived compounds, from treating malaria to treating tuberculosis.

Scientists say this means there is still huge potential to find the next antibiotic or AIDS treatment.

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