Science Worm, a bringer of med miracles

‘Their blood can transport 40 times more oxygen than humans’

PLOEMEUR, France, July 31, (AFP): For centuries, the only use humans found for the lugworm — dark pink, slimy and inedible — was on the end of a fish hook.

But the invertebrates’ unappreciated status is about to change.

Their blood, say French researchers, has an extraordinary ability to load up with life-giving oxygen.

Harnessing it for human needs could transform medicine, providing a blood substitute that could save lives, speed recovery after surgery and help transplant patients, they say.

“The haemoglobin of the lugworm can transport 40 times more oxygen from the lungs to tissues than human haemoglobin,” says Gregory Raymond, a biologist at Aquastream, a fish-farming facility on the Brittany coastline.

“It also has the advantage of being compatible with all blood types.”

Raymond and his team, which specialises in fish egg production, joined forces with biotech firm Hemarina in 2015 in the hope of securing a reliable means of lugworm production.

The facility now churns out more than 1.3 million of the creatures each year, each providing tiny amounts of the precious haemoglobin.

Basically

“We started basically from zero. Since the worm had never been studied, all parameters needed inventing from scratch, from feeding to water temperature,” says project researcher Gwen Herault.

Medical interest in the lugworm — Arenicola marina — dates back to 2003, when the outbreak of mad-cow disease in Europe and the worldwide HIV epidemic began to affect blood supplies.

The problem was that animal haemoglobins, as a substitute for the human equivalent, can cause allergic reaction, potentially damaging the kidneys.

In lugworms, though, haemoglobin dissolves in the blood and is not contained within red blood cells as in humans — in other words, blood type is not an issue — and its structure is almost the same as human haemoglobin.

In 2006, the worm’s potential was validated in a major study.

Scientists at Roscoff, close to Plomeur, extracted and purified haemoglobin from local-caught lugworms and tested it on lab mice. The rodents were fine and showed no sign of the immune response that dogged other animal substitutes.

If proven safe for humans, the researchers said, the worms’ oxygenrich blood could tackle septic shock — a crash in blood pressure that can cause fatal multiple organ failure — and help to conserve organs for transplantation.

Clinical trials of the blood product began in 2015. Lugworm haemoglobin TOLEDO, Ohio, July 31, (AP): Satellites in space and a robot under Lake Erie’s surface are part of a network of scientific tools trying to keep algae toxins out of drinking water supplies in the shallowest of the Great Lakes.

It’s one of the most wide-ranging freshwater monitoring systems in the US, researchers say, and some of its pieces soon will be watching for harmful algae on hundreds of lakes nationwide.

Researchers are creating an early warning system using real-time data from satellites that in recent years have tracked algae bloom hotpots such as Florida’s Lake Okeechobee and the East Coast’s Chesapeake Bay.

The plan is to have it in place within two years so that states in the continental US can be alerted to where toxic algae is appearing before they might detect it on the surface, said Blake Schaeffer, a researcher with US Environmental Protection Agency.

“You don’t have to wait until someone gets sick,” said Schaeffer, one of the leaders of the project.

Across the nation, farm runoff, sewage overflows and lawn fertilizers have washed into lakes and rivers and left behind unsightly algae blooms that can sicken people and pets and harm wildlife.

But often the first reports of harmful algae on a lake come from boaters seeing something strange in the water, said Rick Stumpf, of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

He began using satellites in 2008 to monitor algae on Lake Erie. That work took on a new urgency after a bloom near Toledo’s shoreline

was used last year in 10 human kidney transplants at a hospital in the western French city of Brest and 60 patients are currently enrolled in tests of the blood product across France.

Survive

The secrets of lugworm haemoglobin lie in its ability to survive in extreme conditions, burrowing into sand at the edges of the tide.

The worm grows to about 25 cms (10 inches) in length and has several bushy external gills along its body.

At high tide, submerged in water, the worm builds up stocks of oxygen that, astonishingly, allow it to survive more than eight hours out of the water at low tide. Anyone who has walked along a sandy beach at low tide will see evidence of lugworms, from the tiny coiled casts of sand they throw up from their burrow, 10 cms below the surface. contaminated the drinking water for more than 400,000 people three years ago.

The EPA in recent years has been testing using the satellite data to watch for algae in lakes in California, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Earlier this year, the data helped detect an algae bloom in a Utah Lake near Salt Lake City before officials on the ground knew about it.

“That’s exactly what we we’re trying to accomplish,” Schaeffer said.

The system in development will cast a wider net at a time when many states can’t afford to monitor every lake threatened by harmful algae. The goal is to use the satellite data to watch for algae on 1,800 lakes across the nation and provide four different types of water quality measurements on close to 170,000 lakes.

What satellites can’t measure is the amount of toxins in the water. That’s where samples gathered by researchers come into play. That too can be expensive so researchers have developed an underwater lab that sits at the bottom of Lake Erie and both collects water and tests the levels of toxins before sending the results back remotely.

The whole process takes four hours — much less than the day or two it takes to test samples from a boat.

“We call it the ‘lab in a can,’” said Tim Davis, a Great Lakes researcher with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

The first robotic lab was launched this summer and two more are in the works. While it’s still in the early stages, Davis said it could work in other lakes plagued by algae.

But, apart from anglers who dig up the creatures for bait, lugworms are rarely seen — and breeding them is a novel challenge.

“The main difficulty is working with a small animal that lives its life hidden,” explained Raymond.

Aquastream struggled at first with basic rearing problems — including how to tell a male lugworm from a female. After nine months of testing, “50 percent of adult worms survived and a good deal of them produced eggs,” said Herault.

The larvae start out around 1mm in length and the worms are transported to Hemarina’s testing site once they reach 5mm.

Aquastream director Nathalie Le Rouilly said that her firm’s collaboration with Hemarina could provide the world of medical science with a sustainable supply of the worms.

Researchers creating warning system for lakes

‘Lab in a can’: to spot toxic algae