 Today I will talk about science, technology and society and national development. And for national development, we, the Philippines, we often boast of our ecotourism. Being an archipelago, we have so many islands and so many wonderful places to go to. And one of the best places to go is Bohol. And when I was in Bohol, yeah, there, it's a very beautiful place. We also have this boat cruise, a restaurant which cruises the river. And it's really very nice. And when you travel throughout the Philippines, you can also go into food trips. And one of the best ways to go through this cruise boat. And one of the delicacies in the Philippines are our cone snails. So as a biologist, you have added ice whenever you go around the Philippines. You're not just an ordinary tourist, but you have an added ice. You're always looking for something which you can tap as our, for our national products. Those are the cone snails. So this cone snail was tapped and still continuing to study by a famous Filipino scientist, Dr. Baldomero Oliveira. And he discovered conatoxins. This is Dr. Baldomero Oliveira. He discovered conatoxins from Philippines snails. He grew up in Mindanao and as a growing boy, he was collecting cone snails because they were very diverse and they have very beautiful patterns. So from the cone snails, he extracted different proteins, different molecules from a cone snail. And they injected them into mice. And these are the different reactions which were elicited from the mice. Paralysis, twisted, jumping, circular motion, head swinging, and so on. But he had a TC student named Michael McIntosh and he was very interested to study conus magus. And proteins from these conus magus also elicited so many reactions from the mice when they were injected. And these are, each peak represents a protein and these are the effects. My shaking. And he chose the protein or the molecule which elicits shaking in mice. And now that molecule which is now called Pryol. So we'll talk more about Pryol and why it is called Pryol. Pryol is the drug now derived from that cone snail and it paralyzes fish by blocking calcium channels at a motor synapse. This means that once you inject that Pryol into fish, they become paralyzed. Their swimming or movement of muscle is triggered by electrical signals from their nerve cells. But this is blocked by Pryol. So how does this happen? So let's zoom in into the muscle of a fish into their nerves and that's the nerve ending. So whenever a fish swims, it's because of electrical signals from the nerve cells, from the nerves. But when Pryol is injected, when Pryol is injected, the calcium channels are blocked. When once the calcium channels are blocked, the cascade of chemical reactions which elicits movement is paralyzed. Hence your Pryol paralyzes the fish because it plugs these calcium channels. So in the presence of Pryol, the calcium channels are blocked. So the cascade of reactions in order for the move to fish are blocked. So the fish is paralyzed. So in the end, there is no electric signals. Hence the fish is paralyzed. There is paralysis. So when they observed this in fish, the next thing they did was to inject Pryol in mice. And they concluded that Pryol blocks pain signaling in mice. How did this happen? So what happened was when they injected Pryol into the mice, the mice was not paralyzed, unlike the fish. That's because the calcium channels in the mouse muscle are resistant to the Pryol. Meaning they cannot plug the calcium channels in the muscles of mice. But in the muscles of fish, they can plug it. So they wondered why the mouse is not paralyzed but the fish is paralyzed. Because the Pryol cannot plug the calcium channels in the mouse but the fish plugged it. So they did more experiments. So signaling is not blocked by Pryol. Therefore there is no paralysis of muscles in mice and therefore also in humans. But when they did more experiments, they found out that Pryol can plug the calcium channels in the nerve cells, in the spinal cord of mice and humans. And when Pryol blocked the calcium channel signal, that means that the signal does not reach your brain. Therefore you cannot perceive pain. So Pryol is an analgesic for humans but deadly toxin for fish. So in summary, when you inject the fish with Pryol, it can block the calcium channels in its muscles. That's why it is paralyzed. But when you inject it in mice, Pryol will not block the calcium channels. So the mice will not be paralyzed. But Pryol will not block the calcium channels in the muscles of mice but it can block the calcium channels in the spinal cord, in the nerve endings. That's why when you block it, then you cannot perceive pain. So now it's an alternative to morphine. It's now a pain reliever. So why is this so important that it's a pain reliever? There are so many debilitating diseases now which entails so much pain, extreme pain. And patients, they are treated with morphine. But what's the problem with morphine? It's a narcotic. So it's addictive. But in the case of Pryol, it's just a short protein. It's made up of 25 amino acid. It's a very short protein. This shortness and simple structure means that this can be synthesized in the lab. So you can mass produce it in the lab synthetically without harvesting all the cone snails and extracting them and marketing them. So we get a very good product and then at the same time we conserve the source, which are the cone snails. So Pryol means primary alternative to morphine. That's what Pryol means. So this is Michael McIntosh when he was an undergrad when he started his thesis. And now, by the time that the Pryol was marketed, then around 20 years later, this is how he looks now. So that is just from Conus Magus, the Pryol. But we have so much diversity in our marine resources in the Philippines and cone snails are just one of the many riches in our seas. And cone snails, they are actually 700 cone snail species. So if you extract them, each one of them has about 200 peptide toxins, which can be tapped as useful drugs for human health. So if you have 700 times 200, then we have 140,000 peptides, which the Philippines can benefit from if we study them and market them. So we have thousands of potential drugs. Sadly, this is an issue also of brain drain because Dr. Baldo Mero Oliveira is now based in the US and Pryol is marketed by a US company. And it's raking in millions of dollars every year. But this study started right here in the Philippines. So there's a lot of layers of issues in this study. But the good thing is Dr. Baldo Mero Oliveira comes here in the Philippines every now and then and collaborates with our scientists here and research students here in the Philippines. So I hope that this lesson will open our eyes that we have so much diversity in the marine, which we can tap for national development. They can be not only for pain reliever, anti-cancer, anti-HIV, so many things to do. And just like the Pryol, they can be synthesized in the lab. That means we should conserve our resources at the same time, not rape them, that they become extinct. We should enrich them at the same time, tap them. So that's it. Thank you very much.