San Francisco Chronicle - Tuesday, November 10, 1992
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Ever since the discovery of penicillin nearly 60 years ago led to the antibiotic revolution, medical researchers have believed that the scourge of infectious disease was succumbing to the drugs created from the molds and fungi that abound in the earth.

But the pace of new antibiotic discoveries has slowed dangerously, and the standard antibiotics that fight infections by such organisms as staphylococcus and streptococcus bacteria are losing their punch. New strains of tuberculosis -- a disease that doctors once thought was defeated in the industrial world -- have emerged, completely resistant to the current arsenal of drugs. The phenomenon of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is spreading into American cities.

In the search for new drugs from the sea, deep-diving scientists have roamed the world collecting sponges, corals and sea anemones to develop new medicines -- many of them based on the folklore of primitive sea-going people who have long used them against common illnesses.

There are millions of microscopic organisms scientists know nothing about. They exist on tropical reefs and in the cold waters of the Antarctic and the Arctic oceans.

VITAL RESOURCE

The sea is becoming a new and potentially vital resource for a renewed antibiotic hunt, said William Fenical, a chemist and oceanographer who heads the Marine Research Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

"It's an enormous frontier," Fenical said. Some of the bacteria that might prove useful in developing antibiotics, he said, depend on salt for their metabolism. Others contain tiny magnetic particles that orient them to the Earth's magnetic field, and some are bioluminescent, existing in tiny sacs beneath the eyes of small fish and lighting up when the fish command them.

Still others, whose existence was unknown until the 1970s, thrive on sulfur and live only in the deepest ocean vents, where undersea volcanoes mark the rifts between drifting plates of the Earth's crust.

Already, Fenical said, he and his colleagues have discovered a species of shrimp whose eggs are covered with a single species of bacterium that seems to protect the unhatched eggs against infection by invading predators.

Another bacterium produces an extremely powerful anti-fungal agent that protects lobsters and shrimp. It may one day be modified -- perhaps by genetic engineering -- to become a human anti-fungal agent, Fenical said.

DEEP-SEA DRILLING

America's deep-sea drilling program, which has drilled thousands of meters deep in federally sponsored explorations of the Earth's undersea crust, is also bringing up mud cores abounding in unknown microorganisms, Fenical said.

Although it will take at least a decade before anyone will know whether the promising discoveries can be adapted for medical use, the possibilities are there, Fenical said.

For example, one core sample hauled up from 1,000 meters deep beneath the Pacific Ocean off Northern California has been found to contain an unidentified bacterium known as C237 that has been grown in cultures to yield an antibiotic that appears to be effective against certain viruses, human colon tumor cells and even laboratory samples of HIV, the AIDS virus.

Another previously unknown class of bacterium, CNB632, found in muddy marine sediments off the Bahamas, is being tested as a weapon against some of the bacteria that infect humans and that have become resistant to standard antibiotics.

A widespread group of jellyfish, Fenical said, carry strains of bacteria called Salinamida that attack a variety of disease-causing fungi in the laboratory; seem to be "slightly toxic" against several types of cancer cells; and show strong effects against inflammation.

This organism, Fenical said, is being readied for clinical trials in human patients against arthritis and asthma.

Fenical described his new sea-going research at a conference supported by the National Science Foundation and organized by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

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