Can Coral Treat Cancer?

VIDEO: Personal Review on Coral Reef that Can Save Lives. Watch Exciting Video Below..

Surprisingly, coral reefs hold the cures to some of our most common medical ailments.

Climate change is affecting the health of coral ecosystems — and that puts a strain on the medicinal benefits derived from our oceans.
By protecting marine environments across the world, The Nature Conservancy is safeguarding marine biodiversity and ensuring coral reefs will be around for future medicinal discoveries.

Mention coral reefs and there’s a good chance that most people will think of clownfish and bright pink sea fans. But there’s a contingent out there that sees something else: hope. The hope that new compounds can be uncovered in the world’s reefs that can treat people with cancer, diabetes, AIDS, heart disease and other illnesses.

Stephanie Wear, a marine scientist at The Nature Conservancy, says, “Coral reefs have an incredible diversity of life—from plants, animals and fungi down to the tiniest micro-organism. And this diversity holds so much potential for medical research. In fact, we are 300 to 400 times more likely to find that next big medical breakthrough in our reefs than on land.”

Indeed, many medicines already in use originated in coral reefs. Ara-C, a medicine derived from a compound discovered in a Caribbean reef sponge, has helped save the lives of millions of people with leukemia and lymphoma. Now the medicine is created synthetically in a lab, so we don’t have to harvest more of it from the reef. Yondelis, used in Europe to treat soft-tissue sarcoma, is extracted from sea squirt (Ecteinascidia turbinata). And those aren’t the only examples—compounds found in coral reefs are essential sources of medicines that treat everything from diabetes to heart disease to Alzheimer’s.

The world’s reefs and oceans may hold many more compounds that could help treat and cure many more ailments and diseases, but 75% of our reefs are in serious trouble from overfishing, coastal development and pollution.

If we lose our reefs, we may never even have the chance to discover all the benefits they hold for people.
https://www.tnc.org.hk/our-work/by-program/oceans/how-reefs-may-hold-the-secret-cure-for-cancer/