science, health & technology

Looking for malaria cures in Coiba National Park's soft corals

by Eric Jackson

There are problems with medicines for infectious tropical maladies like malaria and chagas disease. The people most affected are poor and can’t afford to pay what the profit-driven multinational pharmaceutical companies want to be paid, so the profit sector doesn’t pay much attention to these diseases, even if malaria alone kills more than a million people every year. There just isn’t the funding to develop vaccines, and the remedies that derive mainly from natural substances know to traditional medicine or discovered by researchers tend to have a short shelf life, as the microbes that are being fought develop resistance to the drugs that are used.

That’s where the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (CBG), which receive some significant funding from the Bill Gates Foundation, comes to fill a void. Comes where? Well, to the reefs off of Coiba, for example.

Marcelino Gutiérrez explained the work to an audience at the Smithsonian Tupper Auditorium on January 17, in one of the relatively rare Tuesday afternoon lectures to be given in Spanish.

The ICBG, with support from Panama’s National Secretariat for Science and Technology (SENACYT) and the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain is looking at the biggest coral reef system along Latin America’s west coast, studying the soft corals in particular. Why the soft ones and not the hard ones? Because hard corals use their rocky skeletons as mechanical defenses, while soft corals must defend themselves with chemicals. It is reasonably suspected that what’s bad for marine predators may also be bad for pestilential microbes.

The search is particularly urgent in the case of malaria, because there are only eight substances that doctors can now use, old ones like quinine having some time ago become ineffective due to resistant strains and the current pharmacopia becoming ever less useful due to the same processes.

So starting in 2002, researchers began to collect specimens from the reefs off of Coiba, and to date they have found seven species of sponges and 11 kinds of coral with possible anti-malarial properties. Then there is a laborious process of extracting and isolating the chemicals found within these organisms, testing them under lab conditions for their effects against the Plasmodium protozoa that cause malaria, then learning how to synthesize those compounds that appear to be effective so that marine species are not driven to extinction by the search for new cures. Only when all this has been done are researchers ready to begin clinical trials that could end with the approval of new drugs.

Doctors are not yet treating malaria patients with things discovered off of Coiba, but it looks as if this may just be a matter of time. When that day comes, those who would save the reefs from destructive fishing techniques, irresponsible develoment and other threats will likely have stronger economic arguments than just the ecotourist dollars that divers spend on their side.