Marine Biodiscovery Centre puts Octopus's Garden in the shade

A RESEARCH centre, dedicated to creating new life-saving drugs by harnessing organisms from the ocean depths, was opened in Scotland yesterday.

The 1.6 million Marine Biodiscovery Centre at Aberdeen University will bring together chemists and marine biologists to explore the use of ocean resources in treating diseases from cancer to bacterial infections.

Researchers will have access to a "library" containing hundreds of compounds and extracts from organisms from across the world. They include organisms recovered from the world's deepest area, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, which goes down as far as 6.78 miles.

Scientists at the centre on the King's College campus are studying the use of marine bacteria to develop treatments for bacterial infections and parasitic diseases and the potential use of fungi from Fijian coral reefs to treat cancer and inflammation.

Professor Ian Diamond, the principal and vice-chancellor of the university, said:

"The globally unique technologies and equipment housed in the Marine Biodiscovery Centre will allow our scientists to expand their capabilities in addressing the challenges of developing new products which could advance the treatment of diseases such as cancer.

"The library facility will also open the door for industry to use the centre to advance their research and development."

Professor Marcel Jaspars, the director of the research centre, explained that the opening of the new facility would take existing research at the university to a completely new level.

He said: "The greatest diversity of life on our planet can be found in the world's seas in the form of marine organisms, which live in a huge variety of habitats.

"Scientists at the University of Aberdeen have been conducting research exploring how the rich and diverse range of unique compounds which exist in these organisms can be used in the development of drugs and other novel biomedical products, for a number of years.

"The creation of the Marine Biodiscovery Centre is allowing us to advance our research using state-of-the-art technologies and work towards important new breakthroughs in this crucial area of medical discovery."

He added: "Almost three-quarters of the drugs that we have for infection nowadays are coming from natural sources, and for cancer it's about 75 per cent as well. A large number of drugs are coming from these sources."

The centre has been funded by the university's College of Physical Sciences and Development Trust with aid from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

The library of compounds and organisms has been established with the help of financial support from the Scottish Universities Life Science Alliance.