Treasures of the Sea products

Drugs of the Deep
Treasures of the Sea Yield Some Medical Answers and Hint at Others
by John Henkel

Don Hochstein raises a thin glass tube up to his eye level and flicks it with a fingernail. Inside the pencil-width vessel, a substance with the texture of gelatin shimmies and wobbles but doesn't move from the tube's bottom.

"There's endotoxin in there, you can bet on it," he says, slipping the tube back into a rack.

Hochstein, former deputy director of product quality control (he retired last Sept. 3) in the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, is demonstrating a simple analytical test. It's one that medical professionals, drug companies, pharmacies, and others use worldwide to detect the presence of endotoxins--dangerous toxic byproducts of "gram-negative" bacteria such as Salmonella and E. coli.

The test is the limulus amebocyte lysate assay and is, Hochstein says, "remarkable" for its origin: the horseshoe crab. The limulus test, along with an osteoporosis treatment derived from salmon and a bone filler made from coral, are approved medical products that come from the sea.

Until recently, virtually all medical products had terrestrial sources. For example, organisms found in soil have yielded products such as penicillin, amoxicillin, and other antibiotic compounds responsible for saving millions of Americans from suffering and death.

Sea-based products are rare, but some experts say the world's oceans and waterways may harbor the next generation of drugs, biologics, and even a few medical devices. Dozens of promising products, including a cancer therapy made from algae and a painkiller taken from snails, are in development at research laboratories right now. Other products, such as an anti-inflammatory drug extracted from an organism called the Caribbean sea whip, are under FDA review. Three approved products already have brought the healing power of the sea successfully into the world of public health.