If you’ve ever come across a rotting log in the woods, you probably thought ugh and sidestepped it.
For Dr. Nicholas Oberlies, however, that log doesn’t represent decomposition, decay and death. It could hold a potentially life-giving key in the fight against cancer.
Oberlies, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is a self-described “natural products guy” – a chemist who looks for bioactive compounds that come directly from nature and have specific pharmaceutical value.
“Let me tell you, I wouldn’t come to work every day if I didn’t think we were going to find something someday that will kill the heck out of cancer.”
The search for anti-cancer drugs is Oberlies’ holy grail. Funded by a grant from the National Cancer Institute, he and his research team are testing filamentous fungi – the cottony white stuff that decays logs and other vegetation – for new anticancer drug leads.
“People ask why I study fungi,” says Oberlies. “There are at least one to two million fungi specimens in the world, and only a tiny fraction has been studied for natural product. In the plant world, which is four times smaller, about 25 percent have already been studied for drug discovery.”
In other words, he’s in a wide-open fungi frontier.
Another huge plus is that one of the world’s largest libraries of fungal specimens lies down the road in Hillsborough. His collaborators at Mycosynthetix, Inc. (whose CEO, Dr. Cedric Pearce, is an adjunct faculty member at UNCG) maintain 55,000 types of fungi from around the world; they’ve been tested for use as antibiotics, anti-flu medication, herbicides and insecticides. But none, before Oberlies’ research began, had been tested for cancer-fighting properties.
The work begins with a fungal specimen that has been grown in a flask. Oberlies’ team makes an extract of the fungus; each extract contains anywhere from 100 to 1,000 different compounds. Their goal is not to isolate everything the fungus produces but to focus on those things that kill cancer.
A collaborating research team at North Carolina Central University tests the extracts for activity against a panel of cancer cell lines. Last year, Oberlies estimates, they tested 200-300 fungal specimens. Ninety-five percent of the extracts turn out to be inactive; the other 5 percent are progressed to the next stage. The extracts, which start out looking brown and gunky, go through many rounds of chromatography, which eventually purify it unto single compounds. At each stage of purification, the fractions are retested for bioactivity. Only compounds that show activity move on to the next stage.
“In the early stages, we’re looking to see if we can kill cancer in a general sense,” Oberlies explains. “As we move on, we see if we can target more specific cancers, such as leukemias, breast cancers or prostate cancers.
“I can tell you that fifteen hundred people will die in the United States today of cancer. And tomorrow fifteen hundred people will die of cancer. So there’s still plenty of research to do. And let me tell you, I wouldn’t come to work every day if I didn’t think we were going to find something someday that will kill the heck out of cancer.”
Photography by David Wilson, University Relations
