The University of Mississippi has released a new study that says sea cucumbers could hold the key to stopping the spread of cancer.
Researchers partaking in the UM-led study found that while sea cucumbers are often considered the ocean’s janitors, cleaning the seabed and recycling nutrients back into the water, the marine invertebrate holds a sugar compound that could block cancer growth in humans. Sulf-2, an enzyme that plays a major role in the proliferation and spread of cancerous cells, can be plugged with a drug containing the cucumber’s compound.
“Marine life produces compounds with unique structures that are often rare or not found in terrestrial vertebrates,” said Marwa Farrag, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the UM Department of Biomolecular Sciences. “And so, the sugar compounds in sea cucumbers are unique. They aren’t commonly seen in other organisms. That’s why they’re worth studying.”
Farrag, a native of Assiut, Egypt, and the study’s lead author, worked with a team of researchers from UM and Georgetown University on the project. The team found that the sugar compound – chondroitin sulfate – inside the sea cucumber species of Holothuria floridana can effectively inhibit Sulf-2 if used correctly.
According to the study, the sea cucumber compound is different from other cancer-slowing medicines in the fact that it does not interfere with blood clotting.
“As you can imagine, if you are treating a patient with a molecule that inhibits blood coagulation, then one of the adverse effects that can be pretty devastating is uncontrolled bleeding,” UM associate professor of pharmacology Joshua Sharp said. “So, it’s very promising that this particular molecule that we’re working with doesn’t have that effect.”
Sharp said that a drug containing the sea cucumber compound could be easier to create and safer to use than current cancer-slowing medications on the market. Unlike extracting carbohydrate-based drugs from pigs or other land mammals, extracting the compound from sea cucumbers does not carry a risk of transferring viruses and other harmful agents, the study noted.
“Some of these drugs we have been using for 100 years, but we’re still isolating them from pigs because chemically synthesizing it would be very, very difficult and very expensive,” Sharp said. “That’s why a natural source is really a preferred way to get at these carbohydrate-based drugs.”
“It’s a more beneficial and cleaner source,” UM associate professor of pharmacognosy Vitor Pomin added. “The marine environment has many advantages compared to more traditional sources.”
In order to take advantage of sea cucumbers and their ability to slow the spread of cancer, according to the study, scientists would need to find a way to synthesize the sugar compound for future testing and eventual drug use.
“One of the problems in developing this as a drug would be the low yield, because you can’t get tons and tons of sea cucumbers,” Pomin said, clarifying that some variants of sea cucumbers are a culinary delicacy in the Pacific Rim. “So, we have to have a chemical route, and when we’ve developed that, we can begin applying this to animal models.”
The interdisciplinary nature of the scientific study, which included researchers from the fields of chemistry, pharmacognosy, and computational biology, underscores the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration in tackling complex diseases like cancer, Pomin said.
“This research took multiple expertise: mass spectrometry, biochemistry, enzyme inhibition, and computation,” he concluded. “It’s the effort of the whole team.”
