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Prize 'changes' prof's career

Deep Cove researcher garners major award for drug synthesis

Deep Cove resident Robert Britton has earned a prestigious research award for his ongoing quest to replicate naturally occurring medicines.

Britton, a synthetic chemistry professor at Simon Fraser University, was given the Career Investigator Award from the provincially funded Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research earlier this summer. The prize will help fund his research and assist the university in shifting some of his teaching duties to others.

"It absolutely changes my career," Britton said. Many of our most important drugs were developed from natural sources, he said.

"The basic idea is that marine organisms or terrestrial organisms like plants develop chemical defences to protect themselves. You can imagine a sponge in the ocean has no physical means of protecting itself, so it evolves a way to protect itself using toxic chemicals.

"We know this intuitively - if you go into the forest and see a brightly coloured mushroom, you know not to eat it because it's probably poisonous. What often happens is the chemicals produced by these organisms tend to have some use in helping to treat human diseases like cancer."

Taxol, for example, a drug that has been used to treat countless cancer patients, was first found in the Pacific yew tree. But producing even a few years worth of the drug from its natural source would have meant wiping out the species.

"It's not ecological," said Britton. "It's not sustainable, so it really comes down to being able to make these things in a lab,"

Britton leads a team of 11 graduate students in working to synthesize 10 different compounds. One of these is eleutherobin, which was found in corals off the coast of Australia.

"It has activity against cancer cells," Britton explained. "But no one could get enough of this material to properly test this. Even if you harvested kilograms and kilograms of this coral you couldn't get enough."

Even with promising molecules, finding a path to it from off-the-shelf chemicals is expensive, time-consuming and uncertain.

"Any one of those reactions can go wrong," said Britton. "Oftentimes, you're inventing reactions as you go along or discovering new reactions. You might get to step five or six and the whole thing falls apart, so you have to go back to step one and take a different route, then you get to eight and it falls apart. So you're never there until you're there in what we do."

Originally from Vancouver, Britton has worked in several world-class universities and also in the pharmaceutical industry before coming to SFU.

"I got to see the whole spectrum of the natural product drug discovery process, from diving, collecting, isolating, solving the structure of these compounds and then synthesizing them in the lab."

balldritt@nsnews.com