UNCW Taps Marine Life for Medicines

If you think cool medical science has to happen only where there are medical schools, you don't know how North Carolina does the life sciences these days.

Just take a gander at the beach buzz beginning in Wilmington.

Dan Baden leads a team of scientists at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science. And believe it or not, they're moving in on starting clinical trials with a potentially game-changing cystic fibrosis therapy spun out of a nasty ocean-going algae.

The drug candidate, which they call Brevenal, stems from their research into breathing problems suffered by Floridians caught downwind from “red tide” algal blooms. 

Winds blowing across the algae-saturated water pick up microscopic particles of a lung-irritating substance called brevetoxin, released when the algae die and break open. One component, a sea spray-aerosolized substance called polyether, causes severe airway symptoms when inhaled.

Brevenal is a polyether too, but the UNCW researchers discovered that it blocks all activity of the brevetoxin. Even better, it helps the lungs clear excess mucus and inhibits inflammation -- at very low doses.

Another group of Baden’s scientists, a research team at led by Associate Research Professor Andrea Bourdelais, has tapped the coastal campus’ fast-growing store of marine life to come up with another potentially significant drug from marine algae.

It attacks a problem scientists have struggled with for decades: how to break through the natural barriers that protect the brain and individual cells from harmful invasion. Though protective, those barriers also keep potentially lifesaving drug therapies and diagnostics from effectively hitting useful targets inside cells or on the “brain” side of the blood-brain barrier.

With grant funding from NCBiotech and the National Institute of Environmental Health Science in Research Triangle Park, Bourdelais’ group has found a microalgae messenger dubbed Escortin that can be paired with cancer drugs, fluorescent molecules and other compounds, to “escort” them into the cells with amazing ease.

Not surprisingly, the university has patented the brevenal molecule and its economic development program MARBIONC (marine biotechnology in North Carolina) is commercializing the polyether-based platform beneath both drug candidates.