Biodiversity in the oceans is enormous. The deeper you go, the stranger life gets, and
the more likely you are to discover new lifeforms. Marine biodiscovery is the process of discovering
new products and processes from marine biodiversity.
Hi there. My name is Marcel Jaspars. I’m Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University
of Aberdeen and Director of the Marine Biodiscovery Centre. I’ve been working in the field of
marine biodiscovery for the last 25 years and I’m now using my knowledge to help the
United Nations to develop a new law to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity of areas
beyond national jurisdiction. Today, I’ll explain to you what we do in our lab, how
we do it, and why.
My group and I welcome you to our laboratory
to see what we do.
The work we do is mainly concerned with the discovery of new drug molecules
for cancer, inflammation and infection, but we also try to understand how nature makes
these wonderful molecules to try and adapt them to make them better drugs or better molecules
for other purposes.
Some treatments, based on marine biodiversity,
that work in novel ways, have been approved in the last 20 years. So far, 9 treatments
based on marine biodiversity, have been approved for use in the clinic for patients. Most of
these work in very new and unusual ways to treat disease.
Besides pharmaceuticals, we also try to discover enzymes that do industrial processes in a
cleaner and greener way, or to discover new nutraceuticals, or cosmetics, or personal
care ingredients.
The marine biodiscovery process can be divided
into a number of steps, starting with the collection of an organism or sediment and
ending with the discovery of a new molecule.
The process of taking that molecule from the
bench into the clinic can take up to twenty years.
We start by collecting organisms such as marine invertebrates, in particular sponges, sea-cucumbers,
sea-mosses and soft corals.
Nowadays, we are more likely to collect deep-sea sediment using
a grab or a coring device and use this to obtain microorganisms that might produce interesting
molecules.
Once we have the deep-sea mud, we ship it back to the lab where we try to isolate strains
of bacteria or fungi. One mud sample can potentially contain thousands of different strains of microbe.
Once we have a pure microbial strain, we will grow a batch of it in liquid culture for chemical
extraction and biological testing.
Once the bacteria have grown for a few days we extract the compounds they have made using
solvent extraction. The extract can contain a mixture of hundreds of compounds.
The next step is a cycle of biological testing and compound purification. It can be tricky
to discover the one biologically active compound in a mixture and we use a range of methods
to achieve this such as solvent-solvent fractionation and chromatography.
We test extracts, fractions and pure compounds against a range of diseases, typically using
cell-based assays. In this, we treat, for instance, cancer or bacterial cells with our
materials and see if they kill them effectively. Most of this work is automated as often thousands
of tests are necessary to discover a few biologically active compounds.
Once we have isolated a pure, biologically active compound, we need to determine its
chemical structure. This is done using spectroscopy, which tells us the mass of the molecule and
the connections between the atoms in the molecule. The instruments to do this are highly sophisticated,
but the methods are well understood.
From discovery of a new biologically active molecule to a marketed drug is a long road.
First, the molecule may need to be modified and then it needs to be produced in larger
quantity. This can be achieved, most commonly, by chemical synthesis or fermentation.
After additional cell-based testing and physical property measurements, the compounds are tested
in animals, before being tested in humans. Human clinical trials can take between two
and ten years to complete before a drug can be marketed.
Many marine-derived molecules are used to treat cancer. Yondelis, derived from a Caribbean
marine invertebrate, took almost 20 years to develop. It is used to treat a type of
cancer for which there was no treatment for the previous 25 years. It is produced using
a method in which a fermentation product is modified chemically to synthesise the molecule.
Therefore, it’s a sustainable process. The treatment dose is so low that it’s only
one milligram per treatment cycle. If you want to imagine that, imagine five grains
of sugar on your hand and that is one milligram. The most remarkable thing about marine biodiscovery
is that the drugs we discover have unique ways of hitting disease. Drugs with new mechanisms
of action are necessary to overcome resistance that is common in cancer and infections.
Thank you for coming to our laboratory today. I hope you learned something about the process
of marine biodiscovery and found it interesting. Thank you.