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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
A Quest For Medicinal Mushrooms [CT]
    #5367523 - 03/05/06 02:07 PM (17 years, 10 months ago)

A Quest For Medicinal Mushrooms
March 5, 2006 - courant.com

GROTON -- As a research scientist interested in developing new drugs from natural sources, E. Edward Mena has worked with, among other things, spider venom and the lethal toxins of cone snails from the Philippines.

But for the past decade or so, Mena has turned his attention exclusively to mushrooms.

Mena, 57, of Ledyard, is the president of LifePharms Inc., a fledgling company that for now is part of the University of Connecticut's Technology Incubation Program.

Mena hopes that someday his vast collection of mushrooms - or, more accurately, his collection of mushroom extracts - will create a prosperous business.

The federal government is helping to accelerate that dream, contributing millions of dollars of grant money for two of LifePharms' projects.

One is the search for a new cancer drug, based on a promising compound derived from a small mushroom collected in upstate New York.

That project was funded in two phases, the first in the form of a one-year, $100,000 grant and the second as a two-year, $900,000 grant, both from the National Institutes of Health.

The second is a five-year, $5 million NIH grant to seek new drugs that can be used to treat people infected with smallpox.

Smallpox has nearly been eradicated as a public health menace, and a large portion of the population has never been vaccinated for the disease. But terrorist threats have rekindled fears that smallpox could be marshaled as a weapon.

Even though the threat of a smallpox outbreak is considered small, the need for a therapeutic drug is more pressing now than decades ago, when vaccination was a childhood rite of passage, Mena said.

"There's a huge population of immune-compromised people now that didn't exist before," he said, including, for instance, cancer survivors, organ transplant recipients and those with the HIV virus, all of whom could suffer life-threatening complications from vaccinations.

Then there's a tantalizing possibility, Mena said: If a treatment drug were effective enough, could it eliminate the need for vaccination?

Toadstools To Drugs?

Mena's search begins in a narrow, cluttered laboratory at UConn's Avery Point campus. A long bench bisects the room, which is bathed in lifeless fluorescent light. Two walls are lined with a motley collection of commercial freezers tightly packed with hundreds of plastic bags filled with mushrooms.

Three technicians methodically reduce the mushrooms to purified extracts, oblivious to the expansive view of Long Island Sound and the lapping waves barely a stone's throw away. Mena, who operates LifePharms with help from his wife, Wendy Login, maintains another lab upstairs in a building shared with the Coast Guard.

The work is precise and its nature difficult to grasp. Just how can a toadstool lead to beneficial drugs?

The answer lies in the mushrooms' constant fight for survival. In the wild, mushrooms continually fight off attacks from insects, bacteria, nematodes and other plants and fungi. They do that by waging chemical warfare, producing special substances to defend themselves. Mena describes them as miniature chemical factories.

"What we have here is a collection of hundreds of thousands of compounds that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to specifically affect some biological systems," Mena explained.

So the central premise driving Mena's research is: Could some of that multitude of chemical compounds also work against biological threats to humans, such as cancer or smallpox?

Mena pointed out that fungal compounds have already led to important drugs, such as Lipitor, which is used to lower cholesterol, and Cyclosporin, which helps prevent the rejection of transplanted organs.

Armed with that hypothesis, Mena began collecting mushrooms. He started in a small lab that was part of a state-run business incubator and began establishing relationships with mycologists, or fungus specialists, all over the country. The trips started soon afterward, and his collection of wild-collected mushrooms started to grow.

Today, Mena says he has samples of about 18,000 of the estimated 20,000 to 25,000 known mushroom species endemic to the United States, all collected in the wild.

He said it's important that the samples are native, rather than grown in a lab, to be sure they've developed the all-important defense mechanisms.

Of that number, Mena and his lab technicians have produced extracts from about 12,000. The process involves breaking down the mushrooms into their component chemicals, analyzing them, and then putting them through various tests for "biological activity," or the ability to have an effect on another substance.

It's like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

In the case of the smallpox study, Mena and his collaborators - he has relationships with several other researchers - are looking for chemicals that will somehow inhibit the virus that causes smallpox. In the cancer study, they're looking for substances that will act on cancer cells, but won't damage healthy cells.

One of Mena's collaborators is Dr. Stewart Shuman, a leading pox virus researcher at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Shuman said his lab has screened "several thousand" extracts from LifePharms, and is seeing how certain substances derived from them act on the smallpox virus. He offered a measured assessment of the chances for success.

"We'll learn something about the virus with these natural products, but whether that proceeds to a clinically useful drug remains to be seen," Shuman said. "The challenge to discovery is to purify the natural ingredient from the mushroom extract and produce more of it and understand how it works."

Cashing In On Mushrooms

The goals of conquering cancer and smallpox are altruistic, but at some point Mena hopes his labors will result in a thriving, money-making business.

Mena, who earned a doctorate at Washington University in St. Louis, said he became convinced of the value of natural sources while working for 10 years in drug discovery at Pfizer Inc.

After leaving Pfizer, he worked as a consultant in Washington, D.C. Among his projects was studying ways that cities can defend themselves against biological attack for the Sandia National Laboratories.

"I was constantly aware that fungus had the potential for drugs," Mena said.

His exploration of mushrooms has already consumed more than a decade. He started the project at Avery Point, but the state program that initially supported him was discontinued.

The University of Connecticut accommodated him with lab space for a while, then formally accepted him into the Technology Incubation Program, which operates at campuses in Storrs, Farmington and Avery Point.

The program "incubates" businesses by offering lab space, specialized equipment, access to UConn expertise and other types of support, said Rita Zangari, the incubator's executive director.

In return, the entrepreneurs pay fees and must offer some type of "synergistic" relationship with the university, a broadly interpreted requirement.

In Mena's case, he pays rent for his labs, sometimes teaches at UConn's Avery Point campus, and employs UConn students.

The idea of the incubator program is to nurture endeavors that have the potential to one day emerge as independent biotechnology businesses that will create jobs in Connecticut and pay taxes.

LifePharms still has a way to go. Mena hopes his many years of labor will pay off as he completes his collection of mushroom-derived compounds.

The idea is to maintain a kind of library of chemicals that will attract drug companies that are interested in a research collaboration or in licensing compounds, paying fees for services, or ideally, paying royalties as drugs are developed.

It's a scenario that Mena has thought about since his days with Pfizer, which maintains its global research and development facility just minutes from LifePharms' labs at Avery Point.

There are more than 1.5 million species of fungus, Mena said, and only 10,000 or so have been investigated for pharmacological activity.

Meanwhile, scientists are spending millions looking for promising chemicals in distant, daunting places.

"We're looking in the Amazon, at the bottom of the ocean," Mena said, "and we don't even know what we might have in our own backyards."


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OfflineRemainRandom50
Do You Need ToKnow Me?
Registered: 01/15/06
Posts: 1,695
Last seen: 14 years, 9 months
Re: A Quest For Medicinal Mushrooms [CT] [Re: veggie]
    #5370534 - 03/06/06 11:33 AM (17 years, 10 months ago)

awesome, i couldnt think about this even happening. That just crazy that mushrooms have the ability to do things of that nature.


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At times I get consumed by my everyday life and will leave the Shroomery. Yet, every time drugs come falling into my life for fun.....I always think about the Shroomery and then I'm back!


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