BIO profile: Top down carbohydrate chemistry

Family-owned company Marinova has been harvesting seaweed from the waters of Tasmania since 1988, and over the years has developed very sophisticated techniques for extracting, fractionating and isolating specific derivatives from the raw material.

The derivatives are fucoidans, a naturally occurring family of large sulphated polysaccharides that are similar, from a pharmaceutical point of view, to heparin, the mammalian polysaccharide. And according to Marinova's business development manager Nick Falk, they can act in very similar ways.

"It is like heparin in a plant - fucoidans act to protect the gametes," Falk says. "You can do quite a lot with it, similar to heparin. These polysaccharides are flexible, so there are certain derivatives that are an anticoagulant, or even coagulant, so they have both sides of the calculation cascade.

"They are viral attachment inhibitors, so they can be used as anti-herpetics and we have a patent in the use of these in herpes. There are also some HIV applications, although purely prophylactic.

"Fucoidans also have an impact on a number of cytokines in the bloodstream, which are in the inflammatory or the immune cascade, so they have immune function and also anti-inflammatory function. They are used for inhibition of things such as TNF-alpha, which is an inflammatory cytokine.

"We are running a clinical trial this year on a specific type of fucoidan as an anti-inflammatory. From a pharmaceutical standard it's fairly small scale, but really the aim is not to develop a drug but to demonstrate activity, so we will have a fucoidan people can work with and then scale up a concentrated derivative."

In August last year, Marinova opened a specialist fucoidan extraction and fractionation facility to extract fucoidans from a wide variety of microalgal species. The facility can provide chemically defined fractions and derivatives for a number of pharmaceutical, neutraceutical and cosmetic purposes. It can also provide fucoidan compound libraries for use in assays.

Marinova also has an active pharmaceutical program focused on the antiviral and anti-cancer properties of galactofucan sulphate (GFS). It works closely with researchers from the University of Tasmania and the University of Chicago and is collaborating with industry on a medical device wound healing application.

It is also working with the Royal Hobart Hospital on a Phase I trial investigating tumour inhibition in end-stage cancer patients; is developing an application for tumour excisory irrigation post-surgery; and investigating an immunological oncology application in association with the University of New South Wales.

"It is carbohydrate chemistry, but top down rather than bottom up," Falk says. "There are a lot of companies out there who are building carbohydrate actives - starting from sugar and building up from there - but we are going from the other end.

"The point of this is that companies are looking to develop pharmaceuticals and devices using polysaccharides sourced from natural ingredients. So we get the seaweeds, we isolate these very high molecular weight polysaccharides, and from those we have a library service so we can fractionate them any way they want or chemically alter them, and then produce a GMP-specific fucoidan or polysaccharide derivative."

Marinova is exhibiting at BIO 2007 as part of the Australian Pavilion.