What is the link between drugs, surgery and limulus, or lymulus polyphemus and king crab? These living fossils, which would be worthy of the greatest respect, have instead become victims of modern medicine. Every FDA-certified drug - as well as every implant and prosthesis - must be tested using a milky blue blood extract from the animal.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
What is the link between drugs, surgery and limulus, or lymulus polyphemus and king crab? These living fossils, which would be worthy of the greatest respect, have become instead victims of modern medicine. Every FDA-certified drug - as well as every implant and prosthesis - must be tested using a milky blue blood extract from the animal.
Despite its common name, in English "horseshoe crab", deriving from the armored appearance and the particular shape of the body, the limulus is more closely related to spiders, ticks and scorpions than to real crabs. His exploitation for medical and health purposes it is due to Dr. Bang, who in 1885 discovered how his blood coagulated in the presence of bacterial endotoxins.
A SPECIAL BLOOD - The limulus immune system, however simple and primitive, is able to effectively recognize the lipopolysaccharides present on the wall of Gram negative bacteria and eliminate the latter by enclosing them in a clot. A reagent called LAL (Limulus amebocyte lysate), or more simply limulus test, able to signal even minimal quantities of toxin possibly present in industrial raw materials and in water, as well as in pharmacology and for the identification of some bacterial diseases. Amebocytes are the white blood cells of the Limulus (the only cells circulating in the animal).
As explained by the Centro Studi La Ruota, a non-profit association born from the will of a group of doctors to pursue the study, deepening and dissemination of techniques for prevention, diagnosis and therapy, which take into account health , the well-being, balance and care of Man as a whole and in his interaction with the surrounding environment, an amebocyte lysate is then obtained from the blood which contains the enzymes that allow gelation in the presence of bacterial endotoxin (LPS).
In fact it is also able to eliminate pathogenic microorganisms. The ALL also has the ability to identify cancer cells and for this reason it is often used in research in the Oncology field (also for Leukemia). Finally, several peptides isolated from limulus haemocytes have been shown, in in vitro tests, to be able to inhibit the proliferation of the HIV virus.
HOW IS BLOOD EXTRACTED? - The problem is that the large-scale use of the in vitro LAL test requires a considerable production of the chemical compound present in the blood of the limulus. Substance which, not yet produced synthetically, still determines today the mass withdrawal from the blood of living individuals.
The blood, the raw material of the test, is extracted from the limuli, without causing death. Practically wild specimens are captured and brought to the laboratories. Here the tissue around their heart is pierced by needles, which are tasked with draining 30% of the blood, which can sell for up to $ 15.000 a liter. When the process is complete, the horseshoe crabs are returned to the sea, away from where they were collected in order to prevent them from being picked up a second time.
Once free, individuals regain their blood volume in about a week, but it takes two to three months for the body to return to normal. Some studies show and 10 to 30 percent of bled people die.
DISASTER CONSEQUENCES - What effect does this have on the population of the species? If the decline in the number of individuals is actually mainly due to climate change, researchers are convinced that biomedical harvesting can be definitively harmful to a population that is already vulnerable today. For the single "bled" soothsayer, on the other hand, the operation is clearly a source of shock, as well as probable death.
There are currently 5 biomedical companies producing in the USA: Associates of Cape Cod (Falmouth, Massachusetts), BioWhittaker (Walkersville, Maryland), Charles River Endosafe Inc. (Charleston, South Carolina), Haemachem (St. Louis, Missouri), and Limuli Labs (House, New Jersey).
AND IN EUROPE? In 2003 the European Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin presented revolutionary new drug testing methods to replace animal testing with safe alternative tests, using human blood cells instead of the rabbit pyrogen test and the LAL test. These test systems are based on the response of human leukocytes (mainly monocytes), which emit inflammatory mediators (endogenous pyrogens) in response to pyrogenic contamination (exogenous pyrogens).
For more info, please refer to this study: click HERE
Roberta Ragni
