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Arctic Waters could hold secret to creating life-saving drugs

Above the Arctic Circle in the Lyngen Fjord of Northern Norway, researchers on the “Helmer Hanssen” are researching for the next generation of antibiotics. In these sea organisms, they hope, are new bacteria to become those drugs. If no one finds new antibiotics for common infections, what will happen is that they will go back to the pre antibiotic age in which a simple cut could turn into an infection that becomes deadly. It costs a pharmaceutical company more than $2 billion to bring a new drug to the market. What were once common treatments are no longer treatable by using standard antibiotics. 70% of the antibiotics still come from nature, normally from sediment samples from land. Now by looking at the ocean, we hope to find new life forms which give us new chemistry that might be able to treat bacterial infections. Jaspers’ Pharm Sea team and they have identified the icy waters of the Norwegian Arctic as a potential breeding ground of new bacteria, in this extreme environment, the sea organisms have been forced to be adapted over time.  

Reflection: what this article shows is that they are trying to find new antibiotics under the sea because there could be a stronger virus that could come up and the original antibiotics won’t be able to help you.