University of the Western Cape, US National Cancer Institute together contribute to scientific discovery
The School of Pharmacy within the Faculty of Natural Sciences at UWC have collaborated on numerous projects with the NCI that have resulted in pharmaceutical advancements in the fight against cancer.
Dr Barry O’Keefe has led the NCI’s Programme for Natural Product Discovery (NPND) since it was established. The NPND is widely recognised as the biggest leap forward for natural products based drug discovery for nearly half the century, and recently, O’ Keefe visited UWC to deliver a public lecture.
Nature is a rich source for scientific discovery, and the Cape coast has been the laboratory for the former Faculty of Natural Sciences dean, Professor Michael Davies-Coleman, for many years.
Since retirement, Prof Davies-Coleman has continued his work with the NCI and has collected source material from the bottom of the ocean, in Algoa Bay and around the Cape coastline. These marine samples were then shared with NCI, who scientifically broke them down to extract their natural data to use in pharmaceutical drugs.
A sample of one of the sea sponges found on
the Cape coast.
Prof Davies-Coleman said: “We associate the ocean with protein and fish… but at the bottom of the seabed, are all the rocks with sea sponges and soft corals and sea squirts all the soft, squishy things”.
“And so they stick. They defend themselves, with many of them producing interesting chemicals, called natural products that they use for defence. Often a chemical defence against being eaten because they can’t run away. They stand and defend, and they don’t have shells of spines, so they reproduce the chemistry, and it’s just serendipitous or just very lucky that some of those chemicals can kill cells or interact with proteins, enzymes in humans that are important in disease states,” he added.
With technological advancements now being the key, Dr O’Keefe led the team that relooked some of the samples that over the years Davies-Coleman had sent to the NCI and he visited South Africa to share the findings they unlocked.
Dr O’Keefe said they were able to further break down the marine samples and it is steadily leading to promising scientific results as they analyse the data. “About 25% of all small molecule drugs are still derived from Natural Products every year, but less and less people were screening them and so we needed to do something to improve the quality of the test sample that they would receive in those screening labs as a primary goal.”
“We worked out highly automated ways to do this, we have partially purified these crude extracts and made a library of on average 20 molecules per tube of the complex chemistry that is found in these source organisms,” said Dr O’Keefe.
UWC and the NCI will continue to share scientific data and samples to advance Natural Product Discovery.
Prof Davies-Coleman explained: “If you start looking at these chemicals produced by these marine organisms, a very small proportion a minute a small proportion may have some value as medicines, whether it’s anti-cancer drugs, anti-TB drugs or anti-malarial drugs”.