May 10, 2004 (AP)
By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
About seven miles off the marshy Louisiana coast, oil-rig platforms rise like skyscrapers from the heaving waters of the Gulf of Mexico's "oil patch."

In this 64,000-square-mile stretch of shallow ocean where 4,000 steel platforms pump enough petroleum to account for one-third of the nation's production, Fred Rainey, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University, was on the trail of an unlikely quarry: slime. In particular he sought algae, sponges, sea urchins, soft corals and other squishy, mostly immobile organisms that have attached to the oil platforms' undersides in tangled mats up to a foot and a half thick.

Scientists believe that from such lowly marine creatures a number of medications may one day be derived. Slime, it turns out, is absolutely brilliant at producing useful biochemicals.

Botanists and chemists have long prospected in tropical forests and other terrestrial ecosystems for unusual substances to meet human needs. But the world's oceans, which may contain as many as 2-million undiscovered species, have remained largely untapped.

However, as advances in diving technology open new underwater realms to exploration, and developments in molecular biology and genetics allow labs to isolate molecules at a pace unimagined even a decade ago, the sea's potential as a biochemical resource is becoming apparent.

Recently, a research team, led by Rainey, conducted a three-day collecting expedition from Port Fourchon, La. The plan was to collect samples at five oil-rig platforms. At each rig, the divers would chisel off a few pounds of whatever was growing on the platform legs. Additionally, they would use large sterile syringes to collect sea water, and thus the microbes inhabiting it.

Rainey told Smithsonian magazine's Kevin Krajick he had high hopes for the mission. "There are so many microbes out there," he said. "Half of what they bring back will be new to science."

The work done over the years in medical botany has been a major spur for marine bioprospecting. More than 100 important drugs originate either as direct extracts or synthetic redesigns of plant molecules. These include aspirin, from willow bark; morphine, from opium poppies; and the anti-malarial drug quinine, from the bark of the cinchona tree.

Researchers largely overlooked the oceans as a source of pharmaceuticals until the arrival of scuba technology, first tested in 1943. By the 1970s, the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) had begun to fund expeditions around the globe to collect marine samples.

So far, the NCI has screened tens of thousands of marine extracts. David Newman, a chemist with the NCI's natural products program, says the massive canvassing is necessary because only one out of every several thousand substances shows any promise. "You might expect to make a better return by playing Powerball," said Newman. "But with drugs, when you hit, you hit it big."

Most "discoveries" don't pan out, either because test-tube results don't translate to real-world problems or beneficial compounds may cause harmful side effects. Only one or two of every hundred compounds that reach the preclinical testing stage yields a potential pharmaceutical - after anywhere from five to 30 years.

Nevertheless, a score of chemical compounds derived from marine sources are being tested in clinical trials. A pharmaceutical company based in Spain, PharmaMar, is testing a drug, Yondelis, against several cancers. The compound contignasterol is the source of a potential treatment for asthma being developed by a Canadian company, Inflazyme. The drug reportedly produces fewer side effects than current medications and can be swallowed instead of inhaled.

In the United States, a marine-derived drug that has been extensively tested for the treatment of chronic pain is Prailt. The drug, acting on nerve pathways to block pain more efficiently than traditional opiates, appears to be 1,000 times more potent than morphine and lacks morphine's addictive potential.

With the field of marine products chemistry showing such promise, a new breed of hybrid scientists has emerged: scuba diving chemists. They generally spend half their time shaking beakers in a lab, the other half scraping strange-looking things off underwater rocks.