New Cancer Cure Patents Combine Ocean Science, Informatics and AI
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| Sirenas researchers bringing in samples from the deep sea. Image Barry Brown/Coral Reef Photos |
Nature provides for many of the drugs which are commonly used in medicine. In the search for new drugs to fight cancer there is growing trend of stepping into the unknown ocean to find that which has eluded us for decades. Sirenas a US Company was brought to the eye of this hurricane by the Smithsonian. The company filed new patents for target cancer treatments based on what they described as a “combination of increased and New Microbe Understanding of the World, explosive Computing power, Informatics and Artificial Intelligence”. The patents are based on Ocean life molecules.
On December 8 the Smithsonian asked “Will the Next Big Cancer Drug Come From the Ocean?” Their latest report on the issue focused on the new California startup which “bio prospects” for sponges, algae and other organisms whose chemistry may be useful to the World of Medicine
But it is not just a new drug that is needed to treat cancer. From economics to technical pharmaceutical issues to mutations and specificity challenges block the way. Cancer drugs are becoming everyday more specific to keep up with cancer mutations. The search for an integral cancer fighter to combat manifestations becomes of grand importance when considering the so many different types of cancer that aggravate human health and all the different impacts they cause to the many different parts of the human organism.
“Pharmaceuticals are derived from a weird, wide range of natural and synthetic sources. Thanks to scientists who probe every inch of the globe, one increasingly common source for discovering natural compounds is the ocean. The anti-tumor drug trabectedin was originally made from extract from a sea squirt. Ziconotide, an analgesic for severe and chronic pain, comes from a cone snail,” Smithsonian explains the history and links between Ocean and Human Health.
The prestigious magazine ran a full interview with Sirenas top decision maker. The San Diego, California-based company, assures to be specialized in discovering Marine-based therapeutics.
To accomplish their mission the Team of Sirenas goes out deep into the ocean on average four times a year on expeditions to bioprospect, seek and harvest plant and animal species that may contain compounds helpful in treating diseases plaguing millions around the World.
Sirenas is not only interested in Cancer. They have hands and eyes on almost anything from malaria to tuberculosis to a variety of difficult-to-treat and incurable cancers. The waters where they conduct their expeditions range from the Central Pacific to California to Florida Coasts to even the Caribbean. In the frontline, experienced divers with a thing for sea sponges and algae, including cyanobacteria -perhaps the most famous algae of today and history take the plunge in submersibles or the old school way.
It will take years of expedition, finding the right compound, in lab synthesis and drug testing before even human trials or expeditions. Investment will amount to millions or more. But the cause is worth taking on...
MIT ran a report on December 12 titled “The Cancer Lottery” in which through detailed cases, new developments of drugs used today, personal experiences, medical technical data and economical issues they reached astonishing conclusions. MIT explained that mutations are still today the worst headache for those in the war against cancer. Drugs are becoming very specific and while promising testing shows that some may cure some type of cancers they will find immune mutation systems in other types of cancers. Even then as drugs become more and more specific the disease can complete mutate throughout the stages.
The Human Genome Project believes that the key is knowing the personal molecular information of every patient. They told MIT that the vision is simple: “knowing the DNA sequence of people with particular diseases should reveal the mutations producing those illnesses and offer enticing targets for drugs designed to attack them”.
If so many different types of drugs are already in operation and testing phases and even used to treat some types of cancers why is there a need for further search for new cure compounds that could be found in the Ocean?
“A patient in the right place at the right time might find that a mutation that is not therapeutically relevant one day is treatable the next. Even more treatment in existence today can rise up to 10 thousand USD per month and Health Insurance Plans and Health Companies do not always cover cancer treatment,” MIT explained
Barbara Conley from the National Cancer Institute told MIT that “...eventually we will figure it out,” “But it’s not a slam dunk.”
Even Forbes recognized that Cancer Drug Price needed to be Tamed. “This year, US health care costs will approximate $3.41 trillion. Drug prices are a big part of that”, Forbes reported. The media revealed a graph of cancer drug prices at the time of FDA approval, from 1965 to the present, demonstrating a 100-fold increase.
Sirenas Co-founder and CEO Eduardo Esquenazi is convinced that the missing piece of the puzzle costing millions of lives and billions of dollars is in the Ocean. Speaking to the Smithsonian CEO Esquenazi explained that the work of Sirenas should not be confused with naturopathics.
“What we’re doing is really exploring an emerging understanding of small molecules. We collect a sea sponge, for example, but what we’re really after is everything that’s living in the sponge that makes the microbes. We have evolved out of this huge microbial diversity, and the tools and research we have today look at the chemical dance that has emerged from microbes,” the CEO went field technical.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography has also been recognized as a hotspot in the search for new cancer cure for the past years. The Institute is also interested in sponges. The Scripps highlighted the work of Dr. Patrick Colin.
Dr. Colin -working for the National Cancer Institute explained that the program which has produced the most exciting leads for new cancer treatment drugs has been up and running for over 20 years and was designed and managed by the National Cancer Institute.
“Because sponges and other sessile invertebrates do not move (at least on our time scale, but that is another story!), they have many bioactive compounds, some of which have been shown to have antibacterial, antifungal, or antitumor properties,” Dr. Colin explained.
To find those sponges one has to go deep down into the ocean, sometimes even beyond professional human diving limits, tripping submersibles.
Sirenas Co-founder Esquenazi today active in the search for cancer cures assured that he is moved by a lifelong love of the ocean and his own personal experience with cancer.
“I’ve always been an ocean person. I’ve had an affinity for water my whole life. I spent much of my youth in the Caribbean learning to dive and surf, enamored with ocean organisms beneath the surface. I took science courses all through high school -a lot of biology and at Vanderbilt, I settled on neuroscience,” Sirenas CEO explained.
For the next years of his life the CEO of Sirenas continued to draw further and further away from the ocean and more into grad school of neuroscience as lab work. By 2003 his life was deeply moved when he was diagnosed testicular cancer. He underwent what he described as a “long treatment” which led him to question the direction of his life.
“I kept coming back to the ocean, science and making an impact in medicine because I was learning about all these cancer drugs, which were treating my condition very effectively. All of them came from nature, either plant or microbial sources. Even with a science background, I hadn’t known that, and I began to learn where medicine came from -much of it, if not from nature, then inspired by nature. So then I thought, what about the ocean? As I started researching that, I found a small but vibrant field,” the top man at Sirenas said.
It took him a couple of months to maneuver into the studies and sector of marine drug discovery and get Sirenas off the ground.
“There’s a traditional way of doing this work—at Scripps and elsewhere. Researchers go into the field and collect certain organisms, such as sea sponges, and get certain bacteria and grow it in lab. As you progress in your career and information becomes more apparent, you can begin asking which are the organisms that tend to produce good chemistry. Then you focus on those, and it becomes about finding new types of organisms,” Esquenazi explained how the work is done.
“...you’d go out and collect a lot of stuff and use a cancer or antibacterial test to find something useful for that specific purpose. It was like finding a needle in a haystack and then trying to figure out where the needle is useful for these diseases. We treat that stack of hay as all needles,” he added.
For Sirenas every molecule is studied for its potential and registered.
Sirenas is funded through grants including a $775,000 Gates Foundation Grant, as well as partnership revenue from pharmaceutical companies built on their technology. Impact investors also chip in. They assure that their way of funding is catching on to the sector of oncology and cancer treatment with success in aims of balancing the expensive economics of treatments and investigations.
But Sirenas is onto something even bigger. When the Smithsonian asked “What’s next for Sirenas?”
They responded ambitiously “We’ve filed some patent applications on payload for targeted cancer therapeutics. We believe the current combination of an emerging understanding of microbes in our World with huge explosion of computing power, informatics and artificial intelligence makes this a really exciting place to be.
“The ocean is three times more diverse than the Earth and holds the key to producing new compounds that can be used to treat cancer,” William Fenical, distinguished professor and founding director of Scripps’ Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine CMBB once said.
Today it is not just about finding the right compound but about the integral vision of cancer treatment at large. From the field to expeditions to inlab research, development, testing and the Real World, treatment, effectivity, affordability and success rates.
...”eventually we will get there…”
