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HARBOR BRANCH HUNTS DEEP WATERS FOR MEDICAL CURES
by Eliot Kleinberg - Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
April 14, 2005
DANIA BEACH - Deep-sea sponges are technically animals, but they can't move. So nature has given them chemicals
to ward off predators. Scientists realized years ago that those substances sometimes fight cancer, Alzheimer's disease
and other human ailments. Since the sponges can't come to them, the scientists are going to the sponges.
In the past nine days the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution has spent in the Florida Straits, it has conducted
what's believed to be the first close-up study of the remote Cay Sal Bank by a submersible.
The researchers found three items that they think might be the first of their kind ever seen, including a sponge related
to one discovered in 1995 in the Mediterranean.
Researchers will now examine extracts to see if they are effective against cancer or other diseases.
"Our main goal is to get as much biodiversity as possible from deep-sea habitats to use for finding new medications,"
Amy Wright, head of the Harbor Branch Biomedical Marine Research group, said from the deck of the institution's 204-foot
research ship R/V Seward Johnson.
The two-week expedition stopped Wednesday morning at a facility just south of Port Everglades to switch off some crew
and deal with U.S. Customs officials. The ship was moving from the Bahamian waters of Cay Sal to the U.S. waters of the
Miami Terrace, where the team will spend three days before returning Saturday to the institution's facility north of Fort Pierce.
Cay Sal, just 50 miles from the Florida Keys and 30 miles off Cuba, was used as a staging area for secret missions to the
communist island in the 1950s and was a notorious stop-off for drug smugglers until U.S. and Bahamian patrols subdued the
traffic. It's hard to get to and so has been mostly left alone.
The 26-foot-long Johnson-Sea-Link submersible dove in water up to 3,000 feet deep. The vehicle at times worked its way
up a 1,500-foot underwater cliff blanketed with growth, chief pilot Don Liberatore said as he stood beneath the large vehicle,
which was clamped to the deck. Liberatore showed the nine thrusters and the vehicle's claw, collecting scoop, still and video
cameras and powerful lights. At 3,000 feet "it's pitch black," he said.
The next stop, Miami Terrace, is a 60-mile-long ancient deep-water reef just east of Fort Lauderdale and Miami. During dives
there in May 2004, the team looked at steep rocky walls that had been previously viewed only in 1970 and 1995. A type of
sponge found there in May contained chemicals showing the potential to fight pancreatic cancer, the institution said. About
$600,000 for the mission is part of $1 million given to the institution from a state program to support ocean research.
Harbor Branch is spending about $25,000 a day for the ship and crew of 11 and the submersible and its crew of six, plus
the salaries of the researchers. Probably 15 to 20 years of research, costing millions of dollars, lie ahead before any drug
company would actually include substances in its products, Harbor Branch President and CEO Shirley Pomponi said.
For more information, please contact Mark Schrope at 772-216-0390 or
schrope@hboi.edu. Photos and B-roll related to the discovery are available.
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