Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What are the main drivers of wildlife extinction?
You know, I know I've said it before, but I really mean it. Science Friday can only continue with your support. That's sciencefriday.com slash donate, and thanks. There are a lot of drivers of extinction. Habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, invasive species. But a consequence of almost all these giant problems is the spread of disease.
Right under our noses, many plant and animal species are facing their own little pandemics. Is there something chemists could do to help? My next guest thinks so. Dr. Tim Cernak is a chemist at the University of Michigan. He's been developing drugs for people for 20 years, but more recently his patient roster has started to include sea turtles and frogs and giant reptiles.
We'll hear why he's making drugs for wildlife and why he thinks more chemists should get in on this. Tim, welcome to Science Friday.
Thanks, Thora.
It sounds like you're a man on a mission. Can you sum up the mission?
Yeah, can we use chemistry to improve ecosystem health? I've had the luxury, I guess, of working in human health for so long. And the science is so much fun, right? You're looking at atoms and bonds, and you're buried inside the active site of a protein, imagining a chemical.
Spoken like a true chemist.
That's a chemist's idea of fun. It was important to me to get quickly to atoms and bonds in this podcast, because... Because for all my chemists out there, we just love to draw chemical structures. I could be at the chalkboard drawing hexagons all day long. I love it.
But just looking around at ecosystems and seeing what's going on in the planet right now, it was hard to just continually look away. And then as soon as you start to learn about wildlife diseases, And that the patient populations in some instances are like the last glimmer of their species. Like there are animals that there are just a couple hundred of left on this planet.
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Chapter 3: How can chemists contribute to wildlife health?
Because it was never designed for frogs. Could we put something together that really had frogs in mind as the patient in the beginning and maybe come up with a better option for them that's less toxic and easier to apply?
And then in terms of how do you apply it, so the way that this happens typically in local environments, the frogs will be collected, put in a bath outside of the pond, and then re-released into the pond. Or oftentimes, a zoo will have a conservation mission where they are involved in captive breeding of some of the most endangered frogs on the planet.
And then they're engaged in reintroducing them to their native environments where they haven't been seen in a long time. And then oftentimes they're trying to manage this fungal disease while they're doing that work.
I heard about your patient Pebbles. Tell me more.
Oh, Pebbles. Yeah, Pebbles is like a mascot for our lab. She's incredible. So she's a Gila monster. She's housed at the Creature Conservancy, which is a wildlife rescue center here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And, you know, the saliva of the Gila monster is where we got these modern weight loss drugs. The GLP-1s. Yeah, the GLP-1s, right?
So the first GLP, like, you know, now we're on like generation four of these medicines that's coming out. But gen one was straight up Gila monster spit or a single peptide that comes from Gila monster spit. So crazy, right? That like, okay, like here's this creature.
Here's a giant reptile just spit in a tube and yeah, a medicine comes out.
And treat diabetes, right? I mean, initially diabetes and then we learned about the weight loss aspect of it. I mean, you know, you maybe you could have predicted this. Maybe Gila monsters hardly eat like they can survive by eating four meals a year.
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Chapter 4: What is Dr. Tim Cernak's mission in wildlife drug development?
And yes. So like if you had have known that you could be like, oh, I bet we could make a weight loss drug off of it. But it turns out there's like a type of scientist that just goes out into the wild and like decided that they would screen Gila monster spit against diabetes. Like, wow, this works really, really well.
So anyway, so Pebbles, back to Pebbles, the Gila monster is a local Gila monster here in Ann Arbor that was infected with a parasite and was slated for euthanasia. And so they're like, you know, there's no treatment for this for this parasite. this disease. You, you can't even kill this parasite with bleach.
Like the only, the only known way to kill the parasite before we got engaged was boiling it in water, um, which is not a good medicine. And, um, we, yeah, we hopped in and, uh, we used our, our, our drug hunting hats, uh, and, and found, um, we, we found a treatment for, for pebbles and, uh, we, uh, Worked with the Creature Conservancy. They formulated it up. We were really nervous.
Remember I said that Gila monsters hardly eat anything? The planned dose was seven doses of a pill called bromomycin over 14 days. We're like, how are we going to get her to eat Um, over, over 14 days. I mean, they, they tried the first two doses in little, little pinky mice. So, um, and then she didn't like the mice, but then they formulated it in baby quail. Um, I'm sorry.
Um, but anyways, they did pebbles survive. Did you cure her?
Pebbles has been in full remission for a year now. Uh, she regained all the weight she lost and has really beautiful colors now. Uh, and yeah, she's good.
besides pebbles, can you give me one more example of, um, wildlife where you have intervened?
Sure. So, I mean, avian flu is, is a major, uh, area of research for us. We're identifying those mutant strains of avian flu that are, that are wiping out wildlife populations and trying to design drugs specifically tailored to that situation. Um, Sea turtles are an area of much excitement for us.
We are screening cancer drugs and even attempting to develop new ones that would be specifically designed for sea turtles. Because this is a major disease driving sea turtle stranding in the US right now. They get tumors all over their body and they just can no longer, they get so many of them that they can't swim. It tends to go over their mouth and eyes. It's a really gross disease.
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