Ocean Lecture Series

Marine Drug Discovery: Bringing Cures to the Surface
Esther Guzmán

About the Lecture

Every seventeen minutes someone is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Seventy-five percent of those patients live less than twelve months after diagnosis, while 95 percent live less than 5 years. This low survival rate stresses the need for new therapies to treat this disease.

The oceans, which cover over 70% of the earth's surface, are a rich source of bioactive natural products. The uniqueness, chemical diversity, and complexity of marine natural products represent a valuable and relatively untapped resource for the discovery of potential new drugs. Harbor Branch’s  Center for Marine Biomedical and Biotechnology Research has developed a unique screening library of secondary metabolites isolated from deep-water marine invertebrates. We hypothesize that novel treatments for pancreatic cancer can be found among secondary metabolites from marine organisms.

This lecture will focus on the biology side of the drug discovery program—describing how marine-derived materials are screened to find potential novel drugs that fight against pancreatic cancer. This lecture will highlight some of the current compounds in the pipeline that have very exciting effects against pancreatic cancer. A short video that illustrates collection of the sponges with the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible, as well as a few of the steps followed when turning that sponge into a drug, will also be shown.

About the Speaker

Dr. Esther Guzmán has ten years of research experience on cancer immunology and molecular biology. She received her bachelor's degree in Molecular Biology in 1996 from Salem-Teikyo University, then worked at the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Esther moved to Houston where she received her doctorate in Immunology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2004. Her dissertation focused on understanding the role of the death receptor Fas ligand in the suppression of the immune system following exposure to the ultraviolet component in sunlight. This suppression is critical for the development of skin cancer. Esther's postdoctoral work at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit shed light on critical cellular and biochemical events in the development of melanoma.

Dr. Guzmán joined Harbor Branch's drug discovery program in 2005 as a Postdoctoral Investigator. Her research aimed at the discovery of novel cancer therapeutics, including both development of novel molecular target-based assays and determination of the mechanism of action of compounds discovered at HBOI. In 2007, Dr. Guzmán became an Assistant Research Professor and leader of the Cell Biology Program in Harbor Branch's Center for Marine Biomedical and Biotechnology. This program uses target-based screening in drug discovery for pancreatic cancer. Current focuses are molecules that contribute to the proliferation of cancer cells; future focuses include cancer stem cells and inflammatory molecules.