Researchers funded by a flagship Fife charity believe chemicals found in sea sponges could be “tweaked” to create a new generation of anti-cancer drugs.
Scientist Dr Matthew Fuchter and his team received a £106,079 grant from the St Andrews-based Association for International Cancer Research (AICR).
The experts are using the cash to aid their painstaking investigation of a naturally-occurring chemical found in the sea sponge.
Molecules found in deep sea organisms are already used in research into a number of diseases, including malaria and cancer.
The sea sponge being examined by Dr Fuchter contains the chemical psammaplin A, which is reported to be a powerful blocker of several components of the processing machinery in cancer cells, preventing them from growing and dividing.
Dr Fuchter and his team from Imperial College London have discovered a new way of making psammaplin A which has the potential to inspire novel anti-cancer drugs.
The new route allows the researchers to make variations of the chemical and use the variants to understand the natural product’s anti-cancer activity.
Dr Fuchter’s preliminary results show that his psammaplin A variants are far more potent than nature’s own attempts. As such, they could form the basis of new, selective drugs which could be far more effective in the battle against cancer.
“New chemical routes toward the natural product psammaplin A were developed with the particular view to preparing diverse variants for biological assessment,” Dr Fuchter said
“These routes utilise cheap and commercially available starting materials, and allowed access to psammaplin A variants not accessible via currently reported methods.”
Encouraging preliminary studies have led Dr Fuchter to believe a new range of anti-cancer drugs could be manufactured.
At just 31, Dr Fuchter is the youngest person to receive a grant from the AICR in St Andrews and he said the funding represented a “milestone” in his fledgling career.
“When I got the approval for the grant I was ecstatic. It was a real milestone for a young academic like me.”
Photo used under a Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user Charles Williams.