Research and use of high-throughput robotic screens to identify fucoidanases and sulfatases from marine environments

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Fucoidan is a polysaccharide found in seaweed that has been found, by ARC Medical Devices Inc., to be very effective in reducing adhesion developments in the abdominal cavities of animals after surgery. The success of this product in veterinary use has prompted a desire to develop the product for use in humans. Currently ARC purchases the fucoidan, but the material obtained is of heterogeneous composition. In order to move the product into the human market, they need to develop means to improve homogeneity and purity, and to lower the average molecular weight. Two routes are possible: modifying and purifying the commercial fucoidan, or enzymatically synthesising custom fucoidan from pure simple starting materials. The most practical way towards both ends is to first find enzymes that can degrade fucoidan, and use these to generate material of the desired size, then purify this lower molecular weight material. The other would be to engineer these degradative enzymes into synthetic enzymes and use these to assemble fucoidan of the desired properties. This is however challenging as no fucoidanases have ever been isolated and cloned to our knowledge, but such enzymes must exist. Several approaches to this are possible. Our approach is to screen both libraries of marine bacteria and fragments of genes from marine sources, some of which may well use seaweed as a food source, to look for fucoidanase activity. We shall then identify the responsible genes and from them produce the enzymes to test whether they can carry out the desired task. Successful completion of the project will lead to a process to produce a novel, first in class medical device for the reduction of post-surgical adhesions in humans, which in turn will reduce pain, suffering, infertility and mortality in Canadian patients following common surgical procedures; reduce Canadian hospital stays, hospital re-admissions, and re-operations, which in turn will reduce healthcare costs for Canadian governments and taxpayers; and create scientific, manufacturing and sales jobs within Canada, and export of a high margin product.