An Edinburgh-based company just given £50,000 to scour the Scottish tidal pools may have found a new weapon against hospital superbugs.
The old generation of antibiotics is gradually being overwhelmed by disease-carrying microbes which now kill thousands in hospitals each year. For more than a decade scientists have been combing the environment - from marine sponges to toads and earthworms - for natural products that offer new weapons against infection.
AquaPharm Biodiscovery, founded two years ago by Andrew Mearns Spragg, believes it may have found a set of potential weapons in the sea. At least one marine microbe in laboratory tests has produced a toxin which overcomes methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), now the greatest threat to patients who have undergone surgery. By 2001 the superbug accounted for 41% of more than 12,000 cases of blood infection in hospitals in England and Wales.
"What I am doing is analagous to looking at the rainforest," Dr Spragg said. "In terms of biology, the sea offers some really diverse chemistry. Scottish coasts are very diverse and we have looked at all sorts of coasts and subtidal zones.
"We have found a source that produces a natural product, and this natural product in a test against MRSA shows really good killing ability. Because MRSA is now resistant to most antibiotics, this compound has some interesting chemistry attached to it. We have a patent pending, we are looking for investment to take it to the next stage, and we have collaborations with some major companies to get it into human trials.
"We have only tested it against a handful of bugs, one of which is MRSA."
The company was given a £50,000 boost yesterday by Nesta, the national endowment for science, technology and the arts. AquaPharm is one of the first British companies dedicated to marine drug discovery.
"People have looked at a number of classes of compounds found on the backs of toads and moths," Dr Spragg said. "We don't look at that. We concentrate on blue water, blue sky research. It's exciting, early stage stuff."
Antibiotics such as penicillin are compounds produced in the struggle for survival in microbe communities. The hunt for ever more efficient antibiotics has led to a new generation of "bioprospectors" looking for natural weapons against disease.
So far, only 5% of the marine environment has been described. There could be between 500,000 and 5 million different kinds of marine micro-organism yet to be discovered.
Disease microbes evolve rapidly - they can double themselves in 20 minutes - and each new antibiotic is soon matched by newly resistant varieties of infection. Researchers in Europe and the US have been watching with alarm as increasing numbers of disease strains acquire resistance to the current antibiotics.
