Trichodesmium<\/em>. Bertin, who believes many of the compounds that are considered toxic can be leveraged in the arena of human health, seeks to determine which chemicals can reduce neuroinflammation, and purify active compounds to further access their therapeutic potential.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1223\/shutterstock_1493420024-300x178.jpg\")
\u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in chemicals produced by harmful algal blooms, specifically as chemotherapeutics,\u201d Bertin said. \u201cBut beyond these cyanotoxins, I believe there are numerous chemicals available in the microbial world that can be useful in treating diseases ranging from diabetes to Alzheimer\u2019s. These previously inaccessible compounds may provide the next blockbuster treatment for neurodegenerative disease.\u201d<\/p>\n
Biosortia Pharmaceuticals has also been working with cyanobacterial blooms and the complex microbial communities that comprise them, typically in freshwater systems. The Biosortia team has access to unprecedented quantities of microbial biomass due to their harvesting strategies, and it is able to \u201cmine out\u201d minor metabolites, creating libraries of chemical compounds that would have been previously unreachable for chemists and microbiologists. It is from these libraries that Bertin and Biosortia are pulling chemicals to study.<\/p>\n
\u201cBiosortia is very excited to be working with Dr. Bertin and the team at the University of Rhode Island,\u201d said Ross Youngs, founder and chief executive officer. \u201cThe aquatic microbiome is a diverse, evolutionary precursor and contributor to the human microbiome, creating the only deeply obtainable human surrogate microbiome. Biosortia\u2019s distinct capability to access and demonstrate the extraordinary potential of aquatic microbiomes, small molecules\/metabolites and their pathways as the foundation of life sciences research, can be a game changer in terms of therapeutic discovery. The synergy of Biosortia\u2019s ability to access this next frontier of metabolomic chemistry with the Bertin Laboratory can have a far-reaching effect on developing chemotherapeutics.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Bertin group is screening hundreds of chemical mixtures from Biosortia and assessing the ability of these chemicals to reduce the inflammatory response. Early studies have shown many promising \u201chits\u201d that do not result in any cytotoxicity to mammals, which is key to development in this area. These chemicals will be purified further to isolate single components for additional testing. Follow-up studies will further investigate these promising anti-inflammatories, hopefully moving into animal testing in the near future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pharmacy Professor Matthew Bertin teams with pharmaceutical firm to discover anti-inflammatory molecules from aquatic microbiome Toxic algal blooms can be devastating to natural waterways, robbing them of oxygen, creating dead zones, and sickening people and animals. However, they may also be beneficial, potentially helping combat the progression of neurodegenerative disease, a URI College of Pharmacy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1710,"featured_media":41885,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[35,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-news-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1710"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41882"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42723,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41882\/revisions\/42723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/pharmacy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}