Dr. William Gerwicks research centers on the discovery of bioactive molecules with anticancer, antibacterial, neurotoxic, antiviral, or anti-inflammatory activity from marine organisms. A major effort in his lab has been the discovery of diverse unusual molecules from marine cyanobacteria with potent biological activities in the above assay areas. The pathways by which these complex molecules are
assembled are under exploration using stable isotope tracer methods and NMR analysis. In the last few years, molecular biology techniques have been applied to access some of the unusual enzymes present in these biosynthetic pathways, and thus opened the door for detailed enzyme mechanism studies. Additionally, many marine algae produce prostaglandin and leukotriene analogs that are strikingly similar to substances produced in the human body and that have therapeutic value as pharmacological agents. Dr Lena Gerwick's Lena Gerwick is a lecturer in the Marine Biology program and a research scientist belonging to the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine. Her research interests involve the evolution and functional aspects of innate immunity and its role in inflammation in an aquatic model system. Since 1994 she has been researching the inflammatory response in rainbow trout with the focus being the transcriptional response in the liver and the subsequent secretion of many of these proteins to the blood stream. As a result, many of the inflammatory response proteins (acute phase proteins) have been sequenced and for some the expression pattern has been mapped. To further be able to CONTACT some of the functional aspects of some of these innate immune molecules, Lenas laboratory are using zebrafish as a model so that mutants, RNAi and other experiments etc can be utilized to ask some very interesting biological questions regarding the innate immune system and its role in selection, development, disease resistance and reproduction. Furthermore she is developing tools that can be used for screening of marine natural products as a source of potential new drugs using zebrafish and embryos for early in vivo testing. In addition, several members of Lena's laboratory are actively using modern techniques to determine mechanism of action and specific protein targets of selected natural products, in particular, marine natural products showing anti-inflammatory activity.
