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SALT LAKE CITY — University of Utah Health researchers were able to duplicate a compound found in soft sea corals that is anticipated to be a natural chemical for treating cancer.
"This is the first time we have been able to do this with any drug lead on Earth," said Eric Schmidt, professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Utah.
Schmidt said his lab focuses on how bacteria in animals and the microbiome make compounds that can be used in drugs; their discoveries about these soft corals were published in Nature Chemical Biology on Monday.
He said a postdoctoral fellow who is the first author on the paper, Paul Scesa, grew up in Florida and was interested in local biodiversity there. He obtained the animal, brought it to the lab in Utah and worked on the project.
"My hope is to one day hand these to a doctor," Scesa said in a University of Utah Health article. "I think of it as going from the bottom of the ocean to bench to bedside."
Schmidt said the compound, called eleutherobin, was discovered about 25 years ago, and researchers determined it could be beneficial for treating cancer, but there was not enough of it to move the process forward.
In this study, they learned how the corals make the compound and solved the issue of how to replicate that using organisms in a lab.
The ability to duplicate the compounds created by these corals will allow more research to be done to determine its effectiveness in cancer treatment. Schmidt says their new goal is to produce enough to enable studies to determine the effectiveness and lay the groundwork for more research.
This discovery could lead to research into thousands of other compounds found in corals. Schmidt said a group at the University of California San Diego, which helped them with the study, is looking into more compounds.
The University of Utah Health article said these other compounds could work as anti-inflammatory agents, antibiotics or other medicines. Corals use compounds to ward off predators that try to eat them, so they produce compounds that are edible and drugs created from them can likely be taken in pills rather than by injection.
"These compounds are harder to find, but they're easier to make in the lab and easier to take as medicine," said Schmidt.
He said humans and animals typically get complicated chemicals from foods they eat or from bacteria living inside of them, rather than producing them themselves, meaning this is unique, and could open up more avenues for discoveries.
"What was really amazing to us was to see that animals can make these complex and bioactive compounds. Normally, those are associated with plants or with microbes," Schmidt said.
Schmidt said recent advances in the synthetic biology field made this discovery possible because the sea corals could not be cared for and bred in a lab, which was previously necessary.
"What synthetic biology does is it lets us rewrite the genes that are found in these animals, you know, without having to go out and do those really long and difficult studies," Schmidt said.
This discovery is far from a cure for cancer at this point, but it's a step in the right direction.
Schmidt says they don't know when an effective drug could come from this discovery, but he said if everything works out and it is as promising as initially anticipated when the compound was discovered, a drug could come from the compound around five years from now.
