PRESS RELEASE
Scientists initiate search for new medicines in the Arctic
Medford, Oregon, 1 August 2019 - The Institute for Arctic and Antarctic Biodiscovery (IAAB), the world’s first R&D organization dedicated to drug discovery from the polar regions, announced today that it has successfully completed its inaugural diving expedition in the Norwegian Arctic. The IAAB 's first diving expedition was dedicated to bioprospecting – the targeted harvesting and documentation of diverse marine invertebrates and microorganisms – and was carried out in the Lofoten Islands in the Norwegian Sea. Biological specimens collected during these dives will next be used to isolate hundreds of drug-like biomolecules that will be screened for pharmaceutically useful bioactivities.
IAAB co-director Prof. Bill Baker collecting marine invertebrate samples in the Norwegian Arctic
The field of marine biodiscovery – the isolation and study of biomolecules from marine organisms – was enabled in large part by the advent of scuba diving in the mid-20th century. Despite the youth of the field, marine organisms have already been the source of more than 25,000 biomolecules, many with unique chemical structures and promising pharmacological activity. To date, over a dozen marine biomolecules have already been approved as drugs for various human diseases, including cancer, pain, and infectious diseases.
Nevertheless, the large majority of marine biomolecules discovered to date have been isolated from organisms collected in warm or temperate waters. According to Bill Baker, Co-Director of the IAAB and currently also Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern Florida, "Marine biomolecules have proven to be a novel and reliable source of chemodiversity to support drug discovery research, yet one third of the globe – the polar regions – are largely unstudied. We founded the IAAB in order to focus specifically on marine biodiscovery in the Arctic and Antarctic, with the goal of discovering many novel biomolecules that are unique to these extreme environments."
Alex Crawford, also Co-Director of the IAAB and formerly Project Manager of PharmaSea, an EU-financed research consortium on marine biodiscovery, added, "Having started up the IAAB only in April of this year, we're excited that we already completed our first diving expedition. The samples we collected in these dives will now be processed at our laboratories in Norway, where we will isolate hundreds of different biomolecules and screen them using our microscale in vivobioassay platform. Biomolecules with promising activities will then be structurally elucidated at our laboratories in Florida."
In parallel with the ongoing isolation and screening of marine biomolecules from this diving expedition to the Norwegian Arctic, the IAAB plans to carry out its next bioprospecting expedition in Antarctica in 2020.
A bay in the Lofoten islands, the site of IAAB's first Arctic diving expedition
About the IAAB
The Institute for Arctic & Antarctic Biodiscovery is a new translational research institute dedicated to finding new medicines in the Earth's polar regions. The IAAB is an international and highly interdisciplinary research initiative whose mission is to find bioactive, drug-like small molecules from organisms unique to the Arctic and Antarctic, and to develop these as potential new medicines. Towards this end, the IAAB is currently using its extensive polar field research experience to develop libraries of biomolecules isolated from organisms from Arctic and Antarctic environments, focusing on (1) shallow-water invertebrates, such as algae, sponges and tunicates, (2) deep-sea invertebrates, dominated by sponges and corals, and (3) invertebrate- and sediment-associated microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and diatoms. IAAB's primary interest is in finding structuraly novel marine biomolecules with therapeutically relevant bioactivities for drug-resistant bacterial infections, high- mortality cancers, CNS diseases, and rare diseases.
For media inquiries please contact:
Prof. Bill Baker Dr. Alex Crawford
baker@biodiscoveryinstitute.org crawford@biodiscoveryinstitute.org
+1 813 748 9480 +352 621 163 034