Tuesday 15th June 2010
For those of you who have only recently discovered this blog...WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
Thank you all so much for the emails, texts and friend requests of Facebook...we truly do live in the age of communication!
We are now on the final countdown to the start of our collaborative research work with The University of New Brunswick's Natural Products Research Group (check out their website at http://v8nu74s71s31g374r7ssn017uloss3c1vr3s.unbf.ca/~cgray/index.html). In the next few weeks Andrew Flewelling (photo below), a post-graduate student from New Brunswick, will arrive at The Marine Centre for a 6 month period. Andrew will be looking at the isolation and synthesis of biologically active natural products that exhibit activity against drug resistant strains of pathogenic microbes, and consequently have significant potential as lead compounds for the development of new therapeutics for infectious disease. We will initially focus on natural products produced by endophytic fungi of macroalgae living naturally around the shores of Shetland. Shetland exhibits optimal conditions for macroalgal production due to its clear, clean water, high levels of nutrients in the water column and the high tidal and water movements created by the meeting of the North Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean.
Endophytic strains will be identified, isolated, cultured and extracted. Extracts that exhibit promising bioactivity will be subjected to bioassay guided fractionation using a suite of pathogenic microbes to isolate and identify the active components in an effort to discover lead compounds for the development of new therapeutics to fight infectious disease.
Andrew is part of a research group headed up by Dr Chris Gray (photo below).
Chris and his team are also carrying out other research projects working with doctors at the Saint John Regional Hospital to identify promising drug leads.
“The three plants we are using are ones commonly used by the First Nations and have been used in the fight against tuberculosis for decades with no toxic effects,” says Gray.
Tuberculosis cases high
Canadians don’t hear much about tuberculosis (TB) anymore, but an average of 1,600 new cases are reported each year in Canada. It is a bacterial infection that usually attacks the lungs but can attack other parts of the body and can be fatal if not treated.
According to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control, TB is among the world's most deadly diseases, with roughly a third of the global populaton infected with the illness. Roughly nine million people around the world are diagnosed with TB each year. About two million people die every year from tuberculosis.
Drug-resistant strains of the disease have been on the rise since the 1990s.
“There haven’t been any new drugs developed because everyone thought TB was completely wiped out,” says Gray. But in 2008, there were approximately 30,000 cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis reported around the world.
If his research is successful, the plants’ chemical compounds can be patented and taken to a drug company for development, pre-clinical and clinical trials and distribution.
(Information has been taken from The University of New Brunswick website).