Rotting Mangoes and the Killer Sea Snail

In the future, ocean areas beyond national jurisdiction are treated as the common heritage of humankind. This means that no actor, whether public or private, is allowed to make private property claims over common ocean resources or products derived thereof. Therefore, biotechnological inventions based on marine genetic resources cannot be patented nor IP-protected. The inventions are available open access and all benefits generated from them are considered common to humankind as a whole. In this story, we follow deep-sea biologist Deva, who details how they, alongside medical doctor Shawlin and a little red sea snail, developed a pharmaceutical that stops metastasis in breast cancer. Deva is now old; it took more than half their academic life to develop this medicine. Still, they look back on the 30-odd years they worked with the sea snail and its genome with fondness. 

That year, my mom got a sore on her breast that would not go away. Having been raised in a society where being sick as a woman was still kind of taboo, her first instinct was not to seek medical advice. It took my aunt months to convince her to get it checked, and when she finally did it was not good news; triple negative breast cancer, and an aggressive variety at that. It was growing quickly, and she started treatment a week after she got the diagnosis. I saw her cry most days during this time. I had just finished my studies in marine biology and was getting ready to move from Dhaka to Khulna on a more permanent basis, but had of course postponed my move to be with her; none of us knew if she would make it. But after eight months of treatment, the tumor was gone and she was virtually cancer free. The aggressiveness of the cancer actually made it more susceptible to the chemo, counterintuitive as that may be. And with the treatments done with, my mom gradually started healing. She got her color back, her smile back, her life back. And so did I: I finalized my move and started my PhD shortly after. 

About one year in, I went home again for Eid. It was a beautiful Eid (my parents rooftop mango trees had had a great season), but mom had a backache that would not go away. Apparently, her back had hurt a lot during her cancer treatment. She had attributed it to the chemo, and even though she was not worried and was due for another check-up in a couple of months, I convinced her to see a doctor. Turns out the cancer had spread, metastasized to her skeleton. Her bones were filled with cancerous cells, growing and growing and slowly killing her from the inside. 

My mom died two years later. The treatment did not bite the second time. 

After her death, I buried myself in my work. I was studying interdependencies between the intertidal ecosystems of the Sundarbans and the deep sea communities of the hydrothermal vent fields in the eastern Indian ocean. It was fascinating, and I was so caught up in my research that I dreamt about it; night after night I cruised around the roots of Sundri in small boats, I was chemosynthesizing bacteria in hydrothermal vents, and became a current traveling across the Indian ocean. 

As any responsible researcher would do, I had sequenced the genomes of the vent systems I was researching and geotagged them before uploading all of the information to the PresNet. Among the data was the fully sequenced genome of a little red sea snail: Gigantopelta Glutino. It originally caught my eye because of its rather morbid feeding habits; the snail would gently bite its prey, insert a venomous mix of toxins that both incapacitate the victim and prevent its wound from healing, and then slowly eat away at it as it died. I flagged the species in the database and said it might be of medical interest, and that I would be happy to provide more information and collaborate if a medical practitioner deemed it interesting. 

This is when Shawlin contacted me. She had seen my entry and wanted to know more about the snail. Shawlin was a medical doctor working on treating metastasized cancer. Like many of her peers, she was weary of the harm cancer caused her patients and their loved ones and was committed to ending it. Also a life-long eco-spiritualist, she was certain that the answer would be found in nature. Cancer is so complicated, she has often told me, that there is no way we humans can just “figure it out”. Nature is far cleverer than us, and Shawlin was eager to learn. That is why she spent her free time browsing the genomic databases of the PresNet, looking for some new teachings from the creatures of the common seas. She told me she felt “it” when she stumbled upon my note. I knew what she meant. It was the same feeling I had felt throughout my PhD. I think that is where we found each other, in that tinge of wondrous excitement that comes from learning something new, in that curiosity and thirst for knowledge that at its core drives all people searching for knowledge. 

Shawlin’s message started what would become the journey of our lives: the beautiful, draining and, at times, funny struggle to develop an open-access pharmaceutical with this snail. Despite our personal similarities, it was abundantly clear that me and Shawlin came from different academic worlds. She was used to having to fight for the resources she needed to try her ideas, to having to bargain with for-profit pharmaceutical companies or wealthy philanthropists for funding. I, on the other hand, was used to the not-for-profit nature of the social corporations dealing with marine genetic resources and biotechnology from the ocean commons. This led to some culture clashes that are funny with hindsight. For example, during one of our first funding meetings with MediMahāsāgara, one board member asked about the value of a potential snail-inspired medicine; the look of confusion on her face when Shawlin answered in Taka is hard to beat. 

But to get back to the little red sea snail: it is truly the genius of the treatment. One of the toxins it produces when feeding inhibits a cellular process necessary for wound healing in many organisms. It turns out that this mechanism is also key in cancer metastasis. By learning from this snail and taking inspiration from how it kills, we were able to synthesize a medicine that prevents metastasis in breast cancer. Me and the snail grew very close, emotionally, in the process. I spent months and years with Gigantopelta Glutino (or GG, as I started to call it in my mind) as my primary company. For a while, I really thought I was going mad talking to the few individuals I had in my lab while trying to work out the intricacies of its genetic code, snacking on what seemed an infinite amount of dried mangoes. It was a special time; me and Shawlin were trying to learn from a sea snail how to cure the exact illness that killed my mother, and, in the process, the snail helped me deal with the loss itself. 

Before use of the medicine became widespread, you would almost expect breast cancer to come back through metastasis in patients where it had developed beyond stage I. Metastasization was the most common reason cancer returned in these patients, and it was also the most common reason it turned fatal. Now, it is rare to hear that breast cancer has metastasized. This is of course mostly due to earlier detection of most cases, but also, I have to say, because the medicine virtually eliminates the possibility of metastasizing in patients who are administered it. 

Shawlin, GG and myself might have won the Nobel Prize, but I cannot emphasize enough how much of a collaborative process the development of the medicine really was. My PhD research on biochemical interactions in the ocean was hard-core basic science, as pure as marine biology could get. But because I made that small note on the genetic sequence data I produced, Shawlin could find it and see something in the little red sea snail. She could see it held potential medical value. And because the snail lived in our common seas, we were able to utilize the PresNet to work with a diverse team of marine biologists, geneticists, biochemists, medical researchers, medical practitioners and many many more. Together, we took the study of this snail from pure biology to applied biomimicry and to an actual cancer treatment. It took 30 years of data sharing, idea sharing, worksharing and pure collaboration to finally arrive at a finished medicine which is now produced and administered cheaply and effectively to millions of patients across the globe. Just as the snail's toxin in some ways is a product of ecosystem collaboration and coevolution, our medicine is a product of the collaboration between diverse humans working with more-than-human nature. The medicine is of course not a panacea, but it does save lives; and that’s enough for me. 

Credits: 

The text of this story is the copyright of Tilde Krusberg. This image is the copyright of Tilde Krusberg