Meet the drug developer taking on wildlife diseases
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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. And what's driving their extinction is disease. Tasmanian devils are about to go out because of cancer.
It's crazy. You know, I mean, Tasmanian devil, remember from like Looney Tunes, the guys like spinning around and that species is like on the brink of extinction right now because of cancer. It's crazy.
So it just seems like... And you were like, I can do something about this.
Yeah, I hope so. In large part, these diseases are ones that we understand really well. You know, cancer, for example, or infectious diseases. And, you know, there are some cancers that we can make medicines for quite quickly today. I mean, COVID hit, right? And 18 months later, we had a drug. So I think that these technologies that have been bubbling up for drug discovery, of course, AI, you know, has accelerated things, got me thinking, like, well, what if there was disease in a turtle or a tree or a butterfly? Like, could we... do anything about that situation. Could we prevent the extinction of this creature?
So I want to talk about where you think you could have the biggest impact. Do you have a white whale of wildlife diseases?
So the one that we spend a lot of attention on is chytrid. This is a fungal disease that's driving the extinction of frogs across the globe. It's a global event. It's been described by many as the biggest pandemic on our planet. But it's not known to impact mammals in any way, so you hear less about it, right? But you can kill this fungus with some of our broad-spectrum antifungal agents. The problem that I have is that the dosing window is really narrow for those broad-spectrum agents.
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