USF professors search for cures in polar regions

From the waters of a melting Antarctic glacier, a University of South Florida researcher has found an organism with the potential to fight malaria and other diseases that plague people in the tropics.

It's one of several minute creatures that Bill Baker, a professor in the USF Department of Chemistry, has gathered from the freezing water and brought to the university for study.

He discovered the malaria-fighting compound with Dennis Kyle, of USF's Department of Global Health. Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Natural Products.

Baker doesn't see great commercial application in the compound, found in a bright red sponge. It doesn't improve on existing tropical disease drugs. But he said its discovery has strengthened his belief that the Antarctic waters are filled with potential cures for a variety of ailments.

"We have a really cool algae that produces a very potent antiviral agent," he said.

It's a protein, and he and others at USF are trying to unlock the secrets of how it works.

Baker has spent 20 years searching the Antarctic and other oceans for organisms that might produce new medications. Several years ago, one of his Antarctic finds produced a chemical compound that fights skin cancers linked to overexposure to sunlight.

He sees the Antarctic and the Arctic as untapped sources of medical treatments.

Scientists in search of natural cures prefer warm weather regions, Baker said. "It's not easy to dive in 2 degree centigrade water."

That's 28 degrees Fahrenheit. But it helps having National Science Foundation living quarters, laboratories and ships in the Antarctic.

The NSF pays for much of Baker's work. His primary purpose is to study the ecology of the polar waters, where the sun barely shines for several months a year.

He gathers Antarctic sponges, seaweeds and other creatures to study how the organisms interact chemically with one another in their unique environment. He was there in 2008 and plans to return early this year.

When they're back in Florida, he and his USF colleagues use a multistep process to test his samples for their pharmaceutical potential.

"We have a pipeline of things here in different stages of research," Baker said.

Over time, those discoveries could yield dozens of disease-fighting compounds.