Health News
Coral shaping up as cancer killer
Jul 18, 2005, 4:43 GMT
Sydney - Eleutherobin is the deadly poison that a rare Australian coral pumps into the fish it preys on to stop them dead.
Scientists are fascinated with eleutherobin because its paralysing toxins can kill cancer cells. In fact, eleutherobin is 100 times stronger than taxol, the celebrated cancer killer derived from the Pacific yew tree.
It's a simple job harvesting the compounds that go into taxol. Yew
trees are big and bountiful.
But eleutherobin is produced in minute quantities in a rare coral in a hard to reach place off Australia's west coast. The only way to get it in the required quantities is to synthesis it in the laboratory. So far, laboratory work has been, well, laborious.
But John Mann, of Queen's University in Belfast, Ireland, has good news. Professor Mann's team is making good progress in simplifying the procedure to create a substance that mimics nature's proven performer.
Mann told a Sydney gathering of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute in July that work on synthesising eleutherobin from scratch was well advanced.
© dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
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