Scientists at a Florida University have made a significant breakthrough by discovering a tiny Antarctic sea creature that could potentially help in fighting melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.
Researchers identified bacterial toxins produced by ascidians, or sea squirts, found in icy waters of Antarctica. These toxins show promising remedy for skin cancer according to Brian Baker, professor of chemistry at USF.
A team from the University of South Florida collected these marine invertebrates during a 6-week expedition to remote Antarctic regions.
The researchers have conducted an experimental trial on mice and it has killed melanoma cells in mice, indicating promising opportunity for human-based trials.
“The good news is it didn’t kill the mice. It did kill their cancer, so we know it has the physiological properties to act like a drug,” Baker said. “We need grams of material to do a bigger study in mice, perhaps go into other animal models, and if we can prove the safety, we can actually start some human trials.”
However, producing a safe and effective anti-melanoma drug for humans would take a long time and require a succession of strictly regulated and ever-expanding trials even after a drug was formulated.
“You need hundreds of milligrams to grams of this metabolite, and from a basketball size collection of ascidians we might get one-thousandth of that,” the lead author said. “Obviously we cannot collect 1,000 basketball quantities from the Antarctic, that would destroy the ecology, so one of the things we have to do is figure out how to make this stuff in the lab.”
The discovery of a potential melanoma treatment from an Antarctic sea creature is considered a career pinnacle for Baker. He added, “Killing cancer cells in a petri dish is one thing, but going beyond that is much harder, and the fact that we’ve cleared some of those higher hurdles is really exciting for me. Now we’ve got to make the next hurdle.”