Ledes from the Land of Enchantment

LANL scientist supports the hunt for a cure for cancer

Copyright © 2021

SANTA FE – A team that included a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory was discovered on the ocean floor near Antarctica.

In a new study published Wednesday in the journal mSphere, Patrick Chain, a senior scientist and Laboratory Fellow at LANL, and researchers at the University of South Florida and the Desert Research Institute, “successfully” successfully called a naturally produced melanoma-fighting compound “Palmerolid A” traces’ to its source: a microbe “that lives in an underwater

Patrick chain

Species called ascidian, known as the “sea squirt”. The species is common in the Antarctic waters of the Anvers Island archipelago, LANL said in a press release.

“Palmerolid A” is a toxin that can specifically damage melanoma cells.

Chain, 48, works in LANL’s Bioscience Division. He did not travel to Antarctica for research but hopes to participate in a future exploration.

A sea squirt is a potato-shaped marine invertebrate that is primarily sedentary, that is, permanently attached to a surface.

“There are few places farther from your medicine cabinet than the tissue of an ascidial or ‘sea squirt’ on the icy seabed of Antarctica – but this is where scientists are looking for a new treatment for melanoma, one of the most commonly used.” Types of skin cancer, ”says the article in the mSphere Journal.

The research that was conducted several years ago produced several important results, Chain said.

“Perhaps most relevant to the public, we tracked down and did a lot of detective work to find out which organisms and the underlying molecular machines produce potential anti-melanoma properties,” Chain said.

The chemical “Palmerolide A” was discovered by one of the study’s co-authors to be “very selective in cytotoxicity (the extent to which a substance can damage a cell) towards melanoma, making it specific to kill melanoma cells and being so specific is … it is viewed as very specific as a cancer therapeutic, “said Chain.

“Melanoma is one of the worst types of skin cancers,” he added.

“That’s the hope – that this is a treatment that isn’t toxic to you, but toxic to the cells, the melanoma cells, so it could be a treatment for that specific cancer,” Chain said when asked if this was a cure could be melanoma.

According to the American Cancer Society website, “skin cancer is by far the most common of all cancers” and although melanoma “accounts for only about 1% of skin cancers … (it) causes the vast majority of skin cancer deaths”.

The Cancer Society estimates that about 106,110 new melanomas will be diagnosed with about 7,180 deaths in 2021.

Undiscovered bacterium

The sea squirts at the bottom of Antarctica “have their own microbiota (ecological communities of microorganisms), like all other organisms we have studied,” said Chain. “And we found that the organism that is really responsible for making this potential drug is actually a very poorly characterized and so far undiscovered bacterium that resides in these sea squirts.”

There is a lot of underwater exploration going on in the oceans “to find as much biodiversity as possible and somehow grind it up and look for chemicals that could work either as antibiotics or as cancer therapeutics,” said Chain.

The genes responsible for making the anti-melanoma link, “It turns out, these genes are actually in the genome or in the cells of some bacteria that are firmly attached to the sea squirt,” Chain said.

The bacteria that the team of scientists discovered are unique to the potato-shaped sea squirts.

“We don’t see them (the bacteria) in the surrounding waters, we only see them in the sea squirt,” said Chain.

“This species of sea squirt is widespread in a very thin section of the depth profile of this area of ​​Antarctica,” said Chain.

“When we untangled the many genomic fragments of the different species in the microbiome (microorganisms in a particular environment), we found that the genome of this novel microbe appears to contain multiple copies of the genes responsible for producing palmerolide,” said Chain , in the article.

Alison Murray, lead author of the article and research professor at the Desert Research Institute, wrote: “We have long suspected that palmerolide A is produced by one of the many types of bacteria that live in the sea squirt.

“Now we are actually able to identify the specific microbe that produces this compound, which is a huge step towards developing a naturally derived treatment for melanoma,” wrote Murray.

Future steps are to “better understand and characterize the manufacture of this chemical,” and we have a study that is expected to be published in another journal in the coming weeks that “describes the biochemical ways to manufacture this product,” said Chain.

Scientists are now hoping to find out if they can mass-produce the anti-melanoma bacteria.

“The next step is really now that we understand how it is made and which genes are responsible for this product in mass quantities,” says Chain.

Scientists hope to isolate the bacteria and use CRISPR, a technology that manipulates genomes or a complete set of genetic material in a cell, to advance their research. This genome editing technology is used to treat and prevent the spread of disease.

Chain said making a drug from the bacteria is exactly what penicillin discovered. “It is likely to be five years” before an anti-melanoma drug could possibly be made, Chain said.

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