Chris Shaw is getting used to being known as ‘the frog man.’ And he is happy about it.
It means that he is being noticed, that he and his team at Queen’s are being recognised for their innovative research into natural resources and how this can help in the treatment of major diseases.
Chris is Professor in Drug Discovery at the School of Pharmacy. His exciting work involves the discovery and characterisation of biologically active agents within nature, in particular from the venoms of amphibians such as frogs and toads. In 2011 this brought a commendation at the Medical Futures Innovation Awards in London.
At the heart of the research are two peptides – as Chris explains, ‘short proteins which are in effect the vocabulary of how cells talk to one another.’
One of these peptides is a powerful inhibitor, the other a powerful stimulant of blood vessel growth.
A protein from the waxy monkey leaf frog, found in South America, can inhibit the growth of blood vessels and could be used to kill tumours. Chris says, ‘We’re investigating this actively now as a means of treating solid cancers. Cancers need a blood supply if they are to grow. Our hope with these molecules is to make cancer a chronic disease.
‘Insulin, for example, is one of the oldest and most successful drugs used by the pharmaceutical industry. It is a peptide which was extracted initially from cow and pig pancreas. Our vision is to be able to treat the cancers in much the same way as diabetics are treated, so that although not cured, people can live an almost normal life.’
Another potential resource is the giant fire-bellied toad. It produces a peptide protein which can stimulate blood vessel growth. It is thus of potential use in clinical"We’re investigating this actively now as a means of treating solid cancers." situations where blood supply has been damaged or is in need of replacement. There is an array of potential applications in wound-healing, organ transplants, diabetic ulcers and damage caused by strokes or heart conditions.
Chris says, ‘Some years ago figures produced by the World Health Organisation showed that 85 per cent of humanity use traditional medicines as the sole means of health care. This means that the drugs with which we are familiar are available to just 15 per cent of people on the planet. That is astonishing.
‘If you examine some of the major traditional medicine cultures, such as those found in India, China and most of South America, you will find a huge resource that remains, even today, largely untapped. Colleagues who have studied these medicines are gaining some incredible insights into their functionality. And in our own work we’re going back to those roots, back to what are unique sources of knowledge about unique molecules.’
He adds, ‘In drug discovery today, even with the billions being invested in systematic logical screening of compounds, many major drugs have been discovered either by accident or trial and error and that’s exactly how the medicinal concoctions and potions have been developed traditionally over many millenia.’
But Chris is concerned about the threat to many of the amphibians which are his resource. ‘At the present time they’re undergoing mass extinction. Once a species becomes extinct, its DNA and its proteins/peptides essentially become extinct too and in each case we lose hundreds of millions of years of accumulated and naturally-selected molecular knowledge. This is a one-way street.’
Funding the work is crucial but it is being helped by important international links. ‘Over the years we have developed interactions with six Chinese universities. We have a postgraduate training programme for Masters and PhD students and we have now reached a steady state with 32 full fee-paying students from China each year in our pharmaceutical biotechnology programme. They are highly-motivated and happy to be here and in turn we are happy to host them. The amount of data they generate is colossal but even with that we’re still just skimming the surface of a very deep pond.’
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