Is it possible blood from a horseshoe crab can potentially save lives? Maybe or maybe not. Man possibly believes the blood from horseshoe crabs potentially and allegedly saves lives of people desperately needing vaccines. Take a listen to the video above on YouTube.com complements of Bloomberg.com. Video transcript is below for your reading reference.
The following contents below is referenced from the Bloomberg YouTube video above (verbatim):
The horseshoe crab. It's a living fossil that has called Earth its home for almost half a billion years. It's outlived dinosaurs and survived mass extinctions of Ice Ages. But today it's facing a new threat.
Their adaptations have worked with the way the Earth has changed and only in recent years with the with humans bringing impacts to their population that they've started to have declines.
Rising sea levels habitat loss and overharvesting all threaten the population. But if you've ever had a vaccine injection or a medical implant then you might not know that you've been relying on this prehistoric creature's blood to save your life. Now. After decades of waiting a new synthetic solution could change hope.
Here on our beaches on the Delaware Bay it is a place that people are witnessing a phenomena that they cannot see any where else is the equivalent of the wildebeests crossing the Serengeti in May and June here on the Delaware Bay where we are right now millions of crabs come out on a high tide lay their eggs about six inches deep in the sand and they will stay in the sand and hatch in about a month and horseshoe crab eggs are a really critical part of the ecosystem here. If a single crab is laying almost 100000 eggs that is providing a food source for shorebirds for goals for fish for Terrapins and then all up the food chain for that. And then what happens with the horseshoe crabs then trickles down to the whole ecosystem here they just have managed to evolve with the changing oceans and the changing land. The reason this crab has been able to evolve for so long its blue blood
This copper based blood contains special cells called amoeba sites which are extremely sensitive to end of toxins.
These are contaminants released from the cell walls of harmful bacteria and they can cause life threatening fever or toxic shock. As soon as the amoeba sites detect any of these end of toxins the blood clots around the intruder immobilizing it and protecting the crap from infection. In the 1960s scientists found a way to harness this unique super power to make sure our medical supplies were free from contamination and it replaced slower more unpredictable tests involving rabbits. The formula is called limitless amoeba site Lycee or L.A. l. And relies on amoeba sites taken from horseshoe crab blood. And so every year half a million crabs are collected along the Atlantic coast as well as across the eastern shores of Mexico and China. A third of the crabs blood is drawn before they're released back into the ocean. It's estimated that 15 percent of crabs collected die as a result of this bleeding process which could mean the loss of 75000 crabs in the U.S. every year. An alternative was found however almost 20 years ago here in Singapore.
In the past say 20 30 years ago we managed to collect 30 pieces in one afternoon. But now it is difficult to find it.
Even a few in the mid 1980s Professor Ding Jack Lang needed LHO for work involving IVF embryos. But there was a problem.
Singapore research was not very well funded. So because the Ali l was so expensive we had to find a good way to understand how to hush crap luck works. So my research collaborator also my husband together with our research students went to the crunchy mudflats. To look for horseshoe crabs and to bring a few samples back to the
Reclaim them. We tagged them. And we took only a small volume of the blood isolating the blood cells from the horseshoe crab and we could produce our own equivalent of LDL.
This synthetic equivalent is called recombinant Factor C and it's a clone of the main gene in a horseshoe crabs blood which is sensitive to bacterial Indo toxins. It was a moment of. Realisation that it's going to change. The biomedical industry. And it's going to save. A very very highly threatened species. But pharmaceutical companies didn't come around as quickly as Professor Ding had hoped. And so years and then decades past.
We're a highly regulated industry and to say we would like to market a new medicine. A lot of people are reluctant to take a chance on trying something new that's until a scientist at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly with a particular hobby came along birding as a hobby of mine. So to go to Delaware Bay and see the horseshoe crab spawning. It kind of put it all together for me. So the the horseshoe crab is a keystone species in its ecology obviously for its own sake but then for a lot of other animals that depend on it. If we use our FC
Then then there aren't any crabs that are affected whether it's mortality or whether there's some behavioral effects by taking by taking the blood.
Studies have shown that the r FC test is a more effective and a potentially cheaper solution than L.A.. Changing minds however remain the biggest challenge.
There's been several times I was. I was ready to throw in the towel so it's been it's been a difficult journey to fight internally to fight externally. Nobody likes change but we think we're doing it for the right reasons. We have had success and we do. We have the data at the end of the day. Persistence paid off
And in 2018 the first drug to use the recombinant Factor C test was approved by the FDA and Eli Lilly is planning to transition 90 percent of its tests to the synthetic by the end of 2020.
I think the consequence if industry carries on with bleeding crabs that at some point there won't be any. So there are real impacts to what we're doing and the longer we say they'll be available forever. It's likely not true.
It is important that we as humans are playing a role in protecting biodiversity and not impacting biodiversity. The synthetic version of the horseshoe crab lice 8 used by pharmaceutical industry is going to have a major impact on the horseshoe crab conservation. It's not the only factor that we need. We also need to continue with harvest limits. And with beach restoration. But reducing the need to. Harvest crabs for the use of their blood will have a major impact.