Two young women regularly emerged from the deep close to Dalvík in Eyjafjörður in the summer and autumn of 2011; bringing incredibly colourful marine organisms to shore – to the delight of the locals. The bottom of the sea in this area is geothermally active and small geysers there make for a much more diverse ecology than is habitual in Icelandic waters.
“We are looking for chemicals with active pharmaceutical ingredients from the sea and focus on invertebrates,” says Sesselja Ómarsdóttir, Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Iceland, who enjoys wearing a wetsuit in the company of tunicates, swamps and moss animals. “These animals need to defend themselves, and due to the limited possibilities they have for external defence they use other methods, a kind of chemical warfare, and these qualities of the organisms may be utilized in pharmaceuticals, if the chemicals can be found and isolated in the organism.”
Ómarsdóttir has trained as a diver alongside her work as a scientist and lecturer at the University, and Eydís Einardóttir, Doctoral Student, has followed her lead in this, but she is working on this project with Ómarsdóttir. This has facilitated their search for medicine at the bottom of the sea.
“The sea covers about 70% of the earth’s surface and is full of diverse animal life. Special circumstances in the sea around Iceland increase the likelihood that interesting chemical compounds may be found here; research into the enormous chemical resources of the oceans has increased a great deal in the last twenty years,” says Ómarsdóttir.
She says that she has a keen interest in natural product chemistry and that the marine invertebrates produce a large variety of chemicals containing active pharmaceutical ingredients. Eydís Einarsdóttir concurs and says that have many interesting results from this study already: “We have found organisms that produce chemicals that inhibit the growth of cancer cells in vitro and hopefully this will lead to the discovery of new chemical compounds that potentially could be interesting drug candidates.
They say that constant research, discovery and development of new medically active chemicals are an important factor in our fight against various diseases. “There are already three pharmaceuticals on the market based on marine invertebrates, two cancer drugs and one pain killer. Time will tell if new drug candidates are to be found in the Icelandic treasure trove at the bottom of the sea,” says Ómarsdóttir.
