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BOCA COMPANY DEVELOPS MEDICINES FROM MARINE LIFE
by Stephen Pounds - Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Dec. 27, 2004
BOCA RATON - Russ Kerr seems perfect to father the first U.S. medicine from marine life.
The Stanford-educated research professor lived on a sailboat off Fort Lauderdale until his family outgrew it. His office walls are cluttered with pictures from ocean expeditions. He even dresses the part, wearing a lime- and forest-green Hawaiian shirt as he patrols his laboratory at Florida Atlantic University.
Kerr has one foot in academia and the other in free enterprise. He is the director of FAU's Center for Excellence in Biomedical and Marine Biotechnology and chief science officer of Tequesta Marine Biosciences in Boca Raton, the first company to work jointly with The Scripps Research Center's Florida operation.
The drug-making genes discovered in his lab will be cloned to make synthetic equivalents for commercial drugs to treat herpes zoster, a type of chickenpox that causes a painful rash, and seborrheic dermatitis, a scalp condition that causes red, itchy scaling. There are treatments for both, but they are often inadequate.
During the past 80 years, scientists have looked to the land rather than the sea for new medicines. They have honed production methods for terrestrial drugs such as Taxol, a cancer treatment originally derived from the bark of the yew tree.
Only two companies — one in Spain, the other in Ireland — are close to producing ocean-derived drugs. Kerr and his partners want to make Tequesta Marine the third.
"We need people to find marine Taxols," Kerr said. "Only in the past 10 years has it become clear that we have a supply problem of drugs from nature."
The predicament is this: Reefs rich in live coral and sponges are disappearing and must be protected from further destruction by divers and boaters. If new medicines are to be developed from the ocean, they will have to come from molecular biologists and synthetic chemists who create copies of the real thing.
"Ultimately what we want are the genes. That's what's you use to create a synthetic drug," Kerr said.
Key step: FDA approval
More than 20 graduate and postdoctoral researchers in Kerr's lab huddle over beakers and high-tech testing equipment to unlock the secrets of the sea.
Researchers start with a clipping of live coral, flash-frozen directly from the ocean to preserve its chemistry. Once in the lab, the coral is thawed before students begin to separate the proteins inside. As many as 500 proteins might make up one slice of coral, but Kerr's researchers are interested only in ones that go into anti-inflammatory drugs.
"We're trying to isolate certain compounds... to find their chemical properties," said Jamie Frenz, a doctoral candidate working in the lab.
After proteins are extracted from the coral, a special device that operates at 2 degrees Fahrenheit painstakingly separates a protein into amino-acid sequences. Those sequences help to identify the right gene for a new drug. In the final stage at FAU, genes are cloned for drug production.
"Once we find something interesting, we put the gene in a bacteria and it produces it really fast and in large quantities," FAU postdoctoral researcher Lory Santiago said. "It's like a mini-factory."
After key chemical compounds are cloned in larger quantities, they'll be handed over to Scripps synthetic chemists led by K.C. Nicolaou, chairman of Scripps' chemistry department. Nicolaou's team will induce a number of chemical reactions to complete the drug.
Nicolaou, who was unavailable for an interview, has co-founded three companies. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and his work has resulted in 79 patent applications, with 56 granted and 23 pending.
Tequesta Marine's first product will come from a molecule produced from marine micro-algae that one now-defunct biotech firm already tried to commercialize.
It went through early clinical human trials as an anti-inflammatory treatment, but it will need more trials and government approval before Tequesta can sell it.
The company can sell the drug as an anti-allergy additive in skin creams once it perfects the production method. Still, it's seeking $1 million to complete development as a medicine.
It hopes to approach the Food and Drug Administration about testing it on animals in the next 12 to 18 months.
"If you study the reasons that drug studies fail, it's when the FDA says, 'We don't think this animal study is relevant,' " said Tequesta Marine Chief Executive Rhys Williams, a former venture capitalist and combat diver.
In the meantime, Kerr's labmates search the waters off Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas for coral while they hone the cloning process.
"The key to this is the cloning," Kerr said. "We're duplicating this protein in the bacteria, but it is precisely what happens in the coral."
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