Taking on killer infections

A pristine sponge thrived in the middle of a dying Caribbean Sea coral reef. Peter Moeller wanted to know why. The answer he found might be about to rock the worlds of human health and marine science.

Moeller, of James Island, led a research team that isolated a toxin compound in the sponge. The compound allows standard antibiotics such as penicillin to attack the most virulent, antibiotic-resistant bacteria out there — the kind that now defeats medicine's ability to fight them — killer staph infections and cholera.

The finding could open a new door to saving lives.

"We have yet to find a bacteria we can't wipe out with standard antibiotics. We're doing something at the sub-molecular level and we don't know what it is," Moeller said. "We've pulled Superman's cape from these bacteria."

And wait, it gets better. The bacteria apparently don't recognize the compound as a toxin, so don't develop a resistance to it, as can happen with antibiotics. The technique that found the compound could allow researchers to isolate other compounds that fight specific threats.

That could be the beginning of a day when antibiotic medicine can be customized for each patient, treating a specific infection without destroying other, healthy bacteria.

"We can now have personalized medicine," Moeller said. "Dial-An-Antibiotic."

His research is preliminary; the findings must now undergo exhaustive rounds of clinical testing. But the finding is stunning enough that his work is a lead presentation at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting under way in Chicago.

"These compounds could revolutionize how we approach antibiotic resistance. They hold the promise of reversing it," said Carolyn Sotka, a science policy analyst for the Oceans and Human Health Initiative, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program. "It could save lives and a lot of money."

Moeller led a team of researchers at the Hollings Marine Lab at Fort Johnson, the Medical University of South Carolina and North Carolina State University. The machine he did it with is a huge tank mounted on vibration-absorbing legs that looks for the world like a nuclear reactor — a nuclear magnetic resonance device, a kind of MRI for molecules instead of tissue.

How did it happen?

"A bit of serendipity," the 49-year-old concedes with a grin and a shrug. Moeller is a National Ocean Service organic synthetics chemist. His job is to find ways to protect coral; some 80 percent of the coral in the Caribbean has died off.

It's a job of no small importance. Coral are in trouble across the globe from toxins, climate warming and carbon from greenhouse gases. Off South Carolina alone there's an expanse of deep ocean coral as large as the state itself, just beginning to be explored. It could be a pharmaceutical gold mine like the Amazon rain forest.

It's also just beginning to get bottom fished and eyed for mining and oil and gas drilling.

Moeller's finding also suggests new avenues to explore to protect corals.

So far, only 1 percent of the known sea compounds can be reproduced in the lab. That's the big story, Moeller said. "We have only scratched the surface."