By Maggie Puniewska // April 22, 2016 .
Photo by David Doubilet via Getty .
With an estimated 1.7 million new cancer diagnoses every year in the US, and outbreaks of malaria, Ebola and Zika rocking populations around the world, scientists are on a constant search for new compounds that might kill the cancer cells and microbes that threaten human life. Over the past two decades, they've turned increasingly to one important place: coral reefs.
Organisms that live in and around reefs play an integral, often understated, role in drug development. Though reefs cover less than one percent of the earth's surface, they are home to 25 percent of all ocean species, many of which have helped scientists crack some of the toughest medical puzzles: sea sponges were used to develop thebreakthrough HIV drug AZT; mollusks called sea hares in the Indian Ocean have lent their compounds to treatments for breast and prostate cancers; toxins from cone snails have become prototypes for painkillers. Scientists in Sydney are doing promising researchon coral algae to treat malaria. Last December, the FDA approved Yondelis, a cancer-fighting drug made from a compound originally isolated from a sea squirt, a small tubular marine animal that is part of the reef community. And while coral's disease-fighting resume is a bit shorter than the organisms that call it home, its role in medicine is not negligible. Made of calcium carbonate and porous in nature, it has an unusual similarity to the human skeleton and has served as a blueprint for bone graft implants.
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