GREENVILLE, S. C. – Allen Burgenson had a job, his father while standing in the sand.
It’s Allen’s first fishing trip, but it’s not going to take anything to the bay, but to return the gifts from the water to the depths, where they had belonged for millions of years.
If he saw a horseshoe crab on his back, his father said while holding Allen’s hand, it meant he was in trouble and needed Allen’s help to get home. Allen just had to turn it around. Its 10 legs can make the rest of the way back to the breaking waves.
That’s exactly what Allen did that day in 1963 in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, when he was only 3 years old, and that’s what he still does today. Whenever Burgenson enjoys a walk along the East Coast, look for the stranded sea creature that looks nothing like anything else on the planet.
But in 1963, Burgenson did not know that within each of the ancient animals he had saved, there was something that could help save millions of us in his life.
Now, by 2020, horseshoe crab is ready to take on an important role in a drug that everyone is waiting for, a COVID-19 vaccine.
Around the same time Burgenson was a boy on the beach, Jack Levin and Frederik Bang began participating in experiments with horseshoe crab blood. His paintings have led to a procedure that channels the maximum magic force of the horseshoe crab immune system, which has helped the animal for longer than the maximum of species that have ever roamed the Earth or rushed to the bottom of the ocean.
Since the 1970s, limule blood has been approved to perform what is called Limulus amebocyte lysing control, or LAL control, an alarm formula that is triggered through a type of bacteria that can cause fever and, in some cases, death.
In undeniable terms, it works like this: first a smoothing aggregate is made from the amebocytes or blood cells of the horseshoe crab; This fluid is then added to any liquid that a researcher evaluates to determine its safety. or replace the color to indicate the presence of a harmful toxin.
John Dubczak, chief executive of Charles River Laboratories, one of the corporations approved through the U. S. Food and Drug Administration, is a member of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration. But it’s not the first time To produce the LAL test, he boldly expressed the effect of the test: “[It] unequivocally increased the quality and protection of injectable drugs and medical devices and this includes all vaccines that protect us,” he wrote.
This creature, which does not exceed 19 inches in diameter, has a meaning that exceeds its footprint – or claw. The Limulus polyphemus, or Atlantic horseshoe crab, lives alone along the coasts of eastern North America and a small component of Central America. Not even the component of one million horseshoe crabs has been taken to biomedical facilities in 2018, according to the latest knowledge published through the Atlantic Maritime Fisheries Commission.
“The health care of the world can thank the horseshoe crab,” Burgenson said.
On September 16, Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a Senate panel that a vaccine may not be available until next year. On the same day, he testified, the new coronavirus cases totaled about 30. millions worldwide, with around 942,000 related deaths.
Regardless of which vaccine is being tested and wins the market race, THE LAL will be to verify the protection of all tissues entering the drug, as well as the final product itself. This entire LAL will come from only 4 production sites in South Carolina, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia.
The five billion-dose application for the COVID-19 vaccine will not be a burden, said Burgenson, who is now chairman of the Atlantic Maritime Fisheries Commission’s Horseshoe Advisory Committee, which estimates that it offers a maximum of 3 days of general production. provide the apparatus to check the protection of the vaccine, with only one of the days of production to check the vaccine itself.
And this gift will be given through an animal that has long been misunderstood and defamed, said Burgenson, a microbiologist with nearly 40 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry.
Horseshoe crab has been overlooked and overexploted for a long time; humans are the greatest risk to invertebrates, whose ancestry dates back to the pre-dinosaur era, more than 400 million years before humans walked on earth.
And when we nevertheless find them, we don’t even quite perceive the call of the thing. Turns out the horseshoe crab is not even a crab.
Horseshoe crabs are more spider-like than crabs, said Daniel Sasson, assistant marine scientist at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. .
This is not to say that they have nothing unusual with the crab. Like a crustacean, it will throw an exoskeleton as it grows. You may have noticed a stranded one, especially after a storm.
It also has anything that looks like a tail, but it’s called telson, which is used to rotate the body, which can weigh 10 pounds. It’s not toxic. It’s not a weapon, even if it sounds scary enough to look like in a sci-fi scene.
All those attributes are loaded into a sturdy, hardened thing that looks like a tank; asteroids and volcanoes can’t even them.
Blue blood is his line of defense. Cells necessarily build a castle in seconds.
Amebocytes, a type of blood cell, can “detect any external particle,” Sasson said, and once they do, they come into action, whether the enemy invader is in the bloodstream or an injury outside the body.
“The rate at which blood clotted around the wound was incredible,” he said. “Let’s say you break a piece of claw. You’d see some blood for, you know, 10. 15 seconds. And then it would be avoided because it would have already absolutely clotted where the Wound Array
During a spell every year, the horseshoe crab crawls to the beaches to spawn, and this ritual provides a rich opportunity to take a closer look at the beaches from Mexico to Florida, Georgia and Maine.
The peak is also regularly the upper night tide under a new or full moon. Females lay about 4,000 greenish eggs, each the length of a pinhead. They may only put several bunches during the season, up to 100,000 in total.
Some men come to earth glued to the female’s back, others sign up to compete to mate. They will snuggle up to each other, in teams of maybe five or six, unless you are in Delaware Bay, the epicenter of the relief of this species, where the clusters are large enough to call galaxies.
Sasson saw the screen once. He heard it first.
“You can hear their projectiles hitting, you know, long before they handed you over to the b,” he says. Hundreds of thousands more people will invade the kisses, he said. A dozen or 20 can be stacked on others in a square meter.
The bleeding procedure is like a blood donation to the Red Cross. They don’t drain,” River explains on his website; you need about 30% of the blood of a horseshoe crab. The facility will also not use injured or unhealthy horseshoe. crab or too young.
Before LAL was developed, scientists tested the protection of a vaccine, for example, by injecting it into a rabbit. If a rabbit had a fever or died, he knew the vaccine was not safe.
This does not mean that all horseshoe crabs, living 20 to 40 years in the wild, process of bleeding. The mortality rate ranges from 3% to 15%. This spectrum takes into account observed mortality and estimates of what might happen after its release into the ocean.
South Carolina, for example, has some of the strictest and oldest horseshoe crab protections in the country. Since the early 1990s, state law prohibits even owning a horseshoe crab without a license.
Floyd claimed that the strict formula works and that the limousine population has been solid or developing for many years. The state takes the count, doing a random drag survey.
Other regions aren’t doing so well. New York’s stock valuation is poor, the 2019 report says. A variety of reasons contribute to the decline in marine animal populations today, ranging from pollutants to coastal habitat loss due to progression or emerging seas.
The old hard horseshoe crab is immune to those global forces.
Concern about the long-term horseshoe crab increased in the late 1990s. The population of red knot beach birds is in decline, indicating disorders at the front of the horseshoe crab. This is because migratory birds have horseshoe crab eggs as fuel to fly about 20,000 miles each year.
In Delaware Bay, up to a million birds will avoid feeding during the skin, doubling their weight.
Subsequent regulations and other protections helped bounce the number of red crabs and horseshoes, as has been the case in the other aspect of the world.
Asian cousins of atlantic horseshoe crab have been decimated in some places, Burgenson said. They have the same legal protections, he said. In Asia, horseshoe crab is used for medical purposes, such as bait and eaten.
When it comes to conservation effort, horseshoe crab has a symbol problem. All the things that make him a survivor (that hard coat, the brisned tail, the bright blue blood) make him not cute and tender.
Burgenson understands. But he’s doing what he can to replace people’s perspective. He even gave his granddaughter a luxurious edition of the horseshoe crab for her crib collection.
He conducts educational meetings as chairman of the Horseshoe Advisory Committee, which is also aimed at hounds in this capacity, as many of the data on the LAL industry are exclusive and horseshoe crab counts for states or regions are kept confidential by law. made a Zoom presentation on the role of the horseshoe crab in the COVID-19 vaccine.
And, of course, he turns horseshoe crabs when he sees them.