Last week saw the most unprecedented reaction to a global health crisis in modern times. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the US President announced a National Emergency that released $50 billion in federal funding, Italy introduced a national quarantine, over 145 countries (and rising) now have recorded cases, travel restrictions are in place in every country around the world, and the New York Federal Reserve announced a $1.5 trillion intervention to stabilize markets.
Most countries are either in the containment phase of the disease (i.e., test, identify and isolate cases) or the mitigation phase (i.e., delaying the spread and ensuring business continuity measures).
At the same time, the race is now on to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, ahead of any second wave of infections later this year.
Last week among the COVID-19 headlines, David Attenborough made a plea calling for Deep Ocean Seabed Mining to be banned. One of the reasons he cited was the importance of deep water corals and microscopic microbes at the bottom of the ocean.
It turns out, these are extremely valuable for modern medicine, including addressing coronaviruses.
A protein from an ocean seabed algae found among coral reefs was revealed to show activity against another coronavirus known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS. MERS is a close relative of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, and was responsible for an outbreak in the Middle East in 2012 that infected almost 2500 people, leading to over 850 deaths in 27 countries (34% fatality). This marine compound griffithsin was extracted from the red algae Griffithsia that is native to coral reefs around the Canary Islands and identified in 2016 to be a potential inhibitor to the MERS coronavirus.
This is just one of over forty marine compounds that have anti viral properties and are undergoing pre-clinical and clinical trials around the world (such as another coronavirus inhibitor from the ocean sponge axinella corrugata found in the Caribbean). These are all at the early stage of vaccine discovery, but help researchers identify areas of high potential. Having such a library of high potential chemical compounds from nature against coronaviruses, could have greatly accelerated progress for vaccine development ahead of time among the several major companies working on these solutions.
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