Crowdsourcing drug discovery: Antitumour compound identified

David Bradley in Spectroscopy.now: “American researchers have used “crowdsourcing” – the cooperation of a large number of interested non-scientists via the internet – to help them identify a new fungus. The species contains unusual metabolites, isolated and characterized, with the help of vibrational circular dichroism (VCD). One compound reveals itself to have potential antitumour activity.
So far, a mere 7 percent of the more than 1.5 million species of fungi thought to exist have been identified and an even smaller fraction of these have been the subject of research seeking bioactive natural products. …Robert Cichewicz of the University of Oklahoma, USA, and his colleagues hoped to remedy this situation by working with a collection of several thousand fungal isolates from three regions: Arctic Alaska, tropical Hawaii, and subtropical to semiarid Oklahoma. Collaborator Susan Mooberry of the University of Texas at San Antonio carried out biological assays on many fungal isolates looking for antitumor activity among the metabolites in Cichewicz’s collection. A number of interesting substances were identified…
However, the researchers realized quickly enough that the efforts of a single research team were inadequate if samples representing the immense diversity of the thousands of fungi they hoped to test were to be obtained and tested. They thus turned to the help of citizen scientists in a “crowdsourcing” initiative. In this approach, lay people with an interest in science, and even fellow scientists in other fields, were recruited to collect and submit soil from their gardens.
As the samples began to arrive, the team quickly found among them a previously unknown fungal strain – a Tolypocladium species – growing in a soil sample from Alaska. Colleague Andrew Miller of the University of Illinois did the identification of this new fungus, which was found to be highly responsive to making new compounds based on changes in its laboratory growth conditions. Moreover, extraction of the active chemicals from the isolate revealed a unique metabolite which was shown to have significant antitumour activity in laboratory tests. The team suggests that this novel substance may represent a valuable new approach to cancer treatment because it precludes certain biochemical mechanisms that lead to the emergence of drug resistance in cancer with conventional drugs…
The researchers point out the essential roles that citizen scientists can play. “Many of the groundbreaking discoveries, theories, and applied research during the last two centuries were made by scientists operating from their own homes,” Cichewicz says. “Although much has changed, the idea that citizen scientists can still participate in research is a powerful means for reinvigorating the public’s interest in science and making important discoveries,” he adds.”