Five Things To Love About Sharks That You Won’t Learn During Shark Week

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“Shark Week,” the insanely popular week-long festival of flesh-ripping, terror-inducing finned creatures, is in full-swing on the Discovery Channel and no doubt will be just as popular as ever in its 28th year. With shows bearing titles like “Return of the Great White Serial Killer” and “Super Predator” this season promises to scare millions of viewers off the beach. Add to that the coincidental rash of real-life shark attacks in North Carolina and it’s fair to say the world’s most fearsome fish is not getting a lot of good PR these days.

Discovery Channel’s executives have promised to make “Shark Week” programming more science-based—a vow that emerged after the network was widely panned for airing the fake documentary “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives” two years ago. That change will be welcome by academics like Jessica Gall Myrick, an assistant professor at Indiana University who studies the impact of the media on emotions and recently published a paper on how violence during “Shark Week” influences people’s fear of the creatures. (More on that later.)

“It’s tricky to communicate science, with its cold hard facts, especially because humans are so attracted to emotional appeals,” Myrick says. “I hope the content lives up to the promise. Maybe people won’t be rushing out to the beach, but I hope they learn more about the importance of supporting shark conservation.”

Fact is, plenty of scientists will tell you there’s a lot to love about sharks that you’re unlikely to learn about from the Discovery Channel’s programs this week. For one, sharks have remarkable immune systems, and many researchers have made headway in the ongoing effort to translate that immunity into new drugs for treating people. Here are some of the ways sharks are contributing to medical research:

Sharks are inspiring new cancer treatments, and no, it’s not from their cartilage.

Shark cartilage dietary supplements were all the rage in the early ‘90s, following the release of studies claiming they could effectively treat cancer. Those studies were later discredited (as noted recently on the Discovery Channel’s shark blog), but more serious efforts to understand how certain sharks fight off cancer are underway.

For example, scientist Carl Luer at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota, FL, is working with scientists at the University of Central Florida and Sun BioPharma to isolate substances found in the immune system of the bonnethead shark, which is naturally resistant to cancer. Luer has made several compounds inspired by the shark’s immune system and is now testing them in 15 different human tumor types.

And an Irish company called Almac Discovery is teaming up with the University of Aberdeen to develop a new technology called soloMERs—human versions of proteins found in sharks that seem to have an innate ability to bind to cancerous tissue. The shark proteins are called single variable new antigen receptor domain antibody fragments (a mouthful that scientists call VNARs for short). Almac said recently that it is developing the technology as a drug-delivery vehicle that will carry anti-tumor “warheads” directly to tumors, while leaving healthy tissues alone.

Shark VNARs are also being deployed towards fighting brain diseases.

Turns out VNARs may help solve one of the biggest hurdles in drug delivery—the inability of many compounds to cross the blood-brain barrier. A Philadelphia company called Ossianix, founded by former Wyeth and Pfizer executives, is working on several VNAR “scaffolds” that could be used to help deliver complex molecules, like protein-based drug treatments, into the brain.

In December, Ossianix expanded a research partnership with H. Lundbeck A/S, a Danish pharmaceutical company that plans to use VNAR tools to develop drugs to treat a variety of diseases affecting the central nervous system.

Sharks might help prevent blindness.

In 1993, Georgetown University scientist Michael Zasloff discovered that a steroid found in dogfish sharks called squalamine has “anti-angiogenic” powers, meaning it chokes off blood vessels. Anti-angiogenic drugs already widely used to treat the eye disease wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The disease, which is marked by leaky blood vessels in the retina, is the leading cause of blindness in older people.

The biotech firm Ohr Pharmaceutical recently began late-stage testing of squalamine eye drops for the treatment of wet AMD. The company is testing the drops in combination with Lucentis—Roche’s blockbuster anti-angiogenic injection for AMD—to see if patients who get the drops have better visual acuity those who receive the injection alone.

Squalamine may be an effective anti-viral and antibiotic, too.

Squalamine has proven to be safe in people and easy to synthesize and produce, making it one of the most widely studied new compounds against a range of diseases.

With the growing problem of antibiotics resistance on everyone’s minds, there’s a widespread demand for new ways to fight infections, and squalamine could prove an important ally there. For example, scientists recently discovered that the compound makes some pathogens more responsive to the widely used antibiotic ciprofloxacin.

And squalamine has been tested against a number of viruses, including dengue and yellow fever. It’s still early days, and there are some negatives—including the fact that squalamine only binds to certain cells types, like liver cells—but the results look promising.

Sharks aren’t that interested in eating us—your fear comes from watching too much “Shark Week.”

Sharks are so uninterested in bothering people that your chances of being killed by one are about 1 in 3.7 million, according to statistics collected by National Geographic. You have a much higher chance of dying from the flu (1 in 63) or even from falling (1 in 218).

So why is everyone so afraid of sharks? Part of the problem, says Indiana University’s Myrick, is that people are naturally drawn to the violent images shown during “Shark Week”—and it is those images that distort the actual threat.

“As far as their personal perceptions of their own risk of being attacked by a shark, we found there wasn’t a difference between the highly violent and the moderately violent clips,” Myrick says. “If there was any shark-on-human violence in the clip, people over-estimated their likelihood of being attacked.”

In September, Myrick and a colleague published a paper in the journal Science Communication in which they described the results of a study involving 531 Americans who watched videos that ran during “Shark Week” and then filled out a questionnaire about their emotional reactions. They discovered that the people exposed to the most violent images—the ones where the sharks are ripping people apart—were more afraid of the animals than people who saw videos of sharks just swimming around hunting for other fish to eat, like they normally do.

This wasn’t so shocking, Myrick says, but what did surprise her was that people didn’t get sensitized to the violence. In other words, they didn’t relax as they watched more videos of aggressive sharks harassing people. “This was different from other studies of violence in the media, which find that people get sensitized when they’re watching something like Robocop or Terminator,” Myrick says. In “Shark Week,” the greater the violence, the more afraid they felt.”

Even when the participants were shown public service announcements that were aired during a past “Shark Week”—ads urging people to support shark conservation and to remember that their chances of getting attacked are very small (see below)—they were still scared out of their minds, Myrick says.

“It speaks to the way content moves us,” she says. “You hope the facts will capture people’s attention, but the imagery is too powerful.”

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I am the author of the upcoming book Heal: The Vital Role of Dogs in the Search for Cancer Cures

Source: Forbes