Venomous cone snails sting passing fish, paralyzing them so they can be digested alive. Fire coral causes painful scrapes and infections when touched, a means of self-defense. And certain reef-dwelling mollusks swallow microbes to build up a protective coat of toxins on their skin.
Coral reefs and other rare environments aren't just fascinating and beautiful. The potent and diverse chemicals created by nature might hold the key to better treatments for cancer, HIV, and many other diseases that stymie doctors — but only if we can reach them in time.
Harvesting and adapting these natural compounds is crucial to the advancement of modern medicine. There's just one problem: Many of the best potential sources for new drugs are at risk of extinction.
Finding Drugs In Nature
The first modern antibiotic, penicillin, comes from a fungus.
Ancient Greeks used molds to fight infections. Polynesian seafarers and 14th-century Chinese-derived painkillers from reef creatures. And in recent years we've learned much more about how to extract chemicals and medicines from natural sources.
"Mother Nature has been doing her chemistry over the last 3 billion years," says David Newman, chief of the Natural Products Branch of the National Cancer Institute. "She isn't making anti-tumor compounds," he explains, but the same chemical that a sea sponge uses to fight predators might also be able to kill cancer cells or viruses.
Cone snail venom is now being used as a painkiller — one that's 50 times more potent than morphine — that eliminates phantom limb pain in amputees. Tunicates, marine invertebrates frequently found around coral reefs, provide anticancer and antiviral chemicals. AZT, the first effective drug against AIDS, comes from a chemical produced in a lab, but the chemical was first found in, and modeled from, a Caribbean sea sponge.
Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say that more than half of modern pharmaceuticals derive from the natural world. In particular, they say that reefs and the creatures that live on and around them show special potential for medicine.
A 2012 review found that of the new drugs approved to fight cancer between 1981 and 2010, only 20.2% were purely synthetic — meaning purely made in a lab, not found in nature or made, derived, or copied from something natural. The same was true for new drugs used to fight infections. Just 22.6% of those were purely synthetic.
Killing Off Potential Treatments
Nature has amazing medical potential because of its biodiversity, but finding new medicines is hard work.
For every medically useful molecule found, thousands have been tested unsuccessfully. Some of those useful molecules, and the species that produce them, can be found in only a few vulnerable places.
"When we lose a single reef or part of a forest due to changes in climate or other causes, we do not know what we have lost," says Newman.
Natural resources with great potential have been squandered before.
Newman tells the story of a researcher who in the late 1980s collected samples of biological material from a certain type of algae growing among mangroves on the coast of a Caribbean island. Tests later showed that the algae contained what seemed to be a promising new antitumor agent. But when the researcher returned, the mangroves had been uprooted, and the area filled in and turned into a golf course.
Why Coral Reefs Matter
The ocean in particular is considered both one of the least explored and potentially most useful sources of new medicines. Called the "medicine cabinets of the 21st century" by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, coral reefs are the most biodiverse sites in the sea.
But they're also the most vulnerable.
They cover less than 1% of the ocean's floor, and more than a quarter of marine life directly depends on them. But they are in dire shape because of the effects of rising temperatures, pollution, and ocean acidification. Many researchers think it might already be too late to save reefs.
According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warming and acidification will cause high extinction rates throughout the tropics, where most reefs are located.
And they aren't the only sites at risk.
"We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach," Elizabeth Kolbert told NPR's Terry Gross while discussing her book "The Sixth Extinction."
There have been five mass extinctions in earth's history, when some tragic event caused the number of species on the planet to plummet. Many people think that climate change, ocean acidification, and habitat destruction have put us on the cusp of a sixth extinction event, causing the "extinction of one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and sixth of all birds," according to Kolbert.
If These Sites Are Lost
It can't be said with certainty that climate change will destroy the molecule that would provide the perfect cure for leukemia or breast cancer or the chemical that could universally eliminate HIV.
New compounds with medical potential could theoretically be found anywhere. A molecule that could treat anthrax was recently found in underwater sediment off the coast of California. The source of an amazing new drug for fighting cancer might exist in some rare, never-analyzed species of fungus growing in New York's Central Park.
But so far, many of the most promising sources of new medicine in the world are in the biodiverse hotspots most at risk of being lost. Sites like reefs are beautiful, interesting places. But even if they weren't, they'd be worth preserving for their medical potential alone.
Unfortunately for much of the world, it could already be too late.
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