UdeM Researcher Marc Surette is Building the Knowledge Base
MONCTON–Marc Surette is on the front lines of research into lipid metabolism to develop drugs for diseases like asthma, arthritis and different cancers.
Lipids are important because they form a skin around the cell and are responsible for communication between cells. While there are existing drugs on the market that target the metabolism of lipids, Surette is digging deeper and looking more closely at how to regulate lipid metabolism with fewer side effects.
With a number of different projects on the go, Université de Moncton professor and New Brunswick Innovation Research Chair in Biosciences Marc Surette finds satisfaction in each step of the drug development process.
One of these projects is the development of a dietary oil that’s a new source of omega-3 fatty acids and has made it to market. This vegetable-sourced oil is non-GMO and was domesticated through a company called Nature’s Crops International. The oil is now being sold in Europe and the United States.
“Nature’s Crop International is an agricultural company and they’ll give contracts to farmers to grow certain crops,” Surette explains. “They don’t put products on the shelf with their name on it, but they produce the oil so that other companies can buy it … they sell the oil in bulk to these companies that will put it in their products.”
Surette says he’s happy with the way they were able to go from the research phase to an actual product being sold. Surette also gets satisfaction from just knowing that projects are moving along and that he’s building a base for products and drugs that might be developed down the road.
Surette’s other projects are in earlier stages, including one to identify genes or proteins that are responsible for certain diseases and another that developed compounds from natural products with drug-like properties that could be candidates for drug development.
“I don’t think we ourselves will develop any drugs or treatments but the way it works in science is we’re working on it, people in Germany (are working on it), in Japan, in the United States. As we publish our work collectively, we get to know more and more about how these genes are involved in disease,” he says.
“The whole goal is to eventually get to the point where someone will be able to take it and commercialize it or develop a treatment. In some of these earlier stage projects, I don’t expect to be directly involved in putting a product on the market but I know that our research will have contributed to the knowledge that’s required to get something to market.”
Surette says he gets excited about every discovery, major or minor, and explains that every step along the way that furthers basic knowledge is important to progress.
“As a professor I work with graduate students who are these young motivated people and that’s wonderful,” he says. “On top of that, being able to contribute to, in either the short term or the long term, the generation of knowledge that will help medicine or people’s health in general, that’s another layer of motivation.”
“To scientists who understand the whole process of developing based on evidence, you can’t skip steps … That early research is just as exciting as the later research where it actually gets applied … The whole process of discovery and then what you do with the discovery, whether it’s a small discovery or something big, that’s really what motivates me, what excites me about doing research.”