Lugworms medical marvels
FOR centuries, the only use humans found for the lugworm -dark pink, slimy and inedible -was on the end of a fish hook.
But the invertebrates’ unappreciated status is about to change.
Their blood, say French researchers, has an extraordinary ability to load up with life-giving oxygen.
Harnessing it for human needs could transform medicine, providing a blood substitute that could save lives, speed recovery after surgery and help transplant patients, they say.
“The haemoglobin of the lugworm can transport 40 times more oxygen from the lungs to tissues than human haemoglobin,” Gregory Raymond, a biologist at Aquastream, a fishfarming facility on the Brittany coastline, said.
“It also has the advantage of being compatible with all blood types.”
Raymond and his team, which specialises in fish egg production, joined forces with biotech firm Hemarina in 2015 in the hope of securing a reliable means of lugworm production.
The facility now churns out more than 1.3 million worms a year, each providing tiny amounts of haemoglobin.
“We started basically from zero. Since the worm had never been studied, all parameters needed inventing from scratch, from feeding to water temperature,” project researcher Gwen Herault said.
Medical interest in the lugworm – Arenicola marina – dates back to 2003, when the outbreak of mad-cow disease in Europe and the worldwide HIV epidemic began to affect blood supplies.
The problem was that animal haemoglobins can cause allergic reaction in people, potentially damaging the kidneys.
In lugworms, though, haemoglobin dissolves in the blood and is not contained within red blood cells as in humans, and its structure is almost the same as human haemoglobin.