Esther A. Guzman, a scientist at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, has received a $375,000 grant for a three-year project to find marine organisms that might help prevent pancreatic cancer.

The 36-year-old Guzman grew up in Mexico City and earned a doctorate in immunology from the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2004. She joined the drug discovery program at Harbor Branch, a division of Florida Atlantic University, the following year.

According to the American Cancer Society, someone is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer every 17 minutes. It’s the fifth most lethal cancer in the United States, with 95 percent of patients dying within five years of diagnosis.

Q. What’s the basis of the study you’re doing?

A. It’s always been suggested that there’s a link between inflammation and cancer, that cancers tend to develop where there’s inflammation that won’t go away. … There’s a particularly strong link between pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas) and the development of pancreatic cancer. Patients with hereditary pancreatitis are about 50 times more likely to develop pancreatic cancer. So I’ll be looking for compounds that demonstrate an ability to reduce the inflammation of pancreatitis with the hope that by reducing the inflammation we can prevent the cancer from developing.

Q. Will the search involve collecting marine specimens, or will you use ones already collected?

A. Here at Harbor Branch we have an amazing library of marine compounds. Some of the more recent cruises collected specimens from off the coast of Florida, but we have them from throughout the Caribbean, the Bahamas and from as far away at the Galapagos (Islands).

Q. Specimens from what?

A. Mostly sponges and a few soft corals. We recently tested a compound from a sea cucumber that looks promising.

Q. How many compounds do you expect to test?

A. Probably about a thousand. A good thing about using specimens from the Harbor Branch library is that we know we have some with anti-inflammatory properties, so I’ll look at those first. And then I’ll have to see if compounds can be translated into something usable. It’s not a trivial process; it takes a lot of time.

Q. Will the results be limited to work with pancreatic cancer?

A. Many other cancers could eventually be impacted because they’re linked to inflammation. But pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive cancers we have, and the drugs we have now are not very effective. A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is pretty much a death sentence. There’s definitely a need for new drugs.

By Tyler Treadway, TCPalm.com

Tags: bahamas, cancer, death, development, drugs, Florida, grants, ill, illness, library, property, search

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 9:36 am and is filed under Stuart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.