An antibiotic discovered on Easter Island in 1964 sparked a $1 billion pharmaceutical success story. However, the story told about this “miracle drug” has completely left out the people and politics that made its discovery possible.
Named after the island’s indigenous name, Rapa Nui, the drug rapamycin was initially developed as an immunosuppressant to prevent organ transplant rejection and improve the effectiveness of stents to treat coronary artery disease. Its use has since expanded to treat various types of cancer, and researchers are currently exploring its potential to treat diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases, and even aging. In fact, studies holding out rapamycin’s promise for extending lifespan or combating age-related diseases seem to be published almost daily. A search of PubMed reveals more than 59,000 journal articles that mention rapamycin, making it one of the most talked about drugs in medicine.
At the heart of rapamycin’s power is its ability to inhibit a protein called target of rapamycin kinase, or TOR. This protein acts as a master regulator of cellular growth and metabolism. Along with other associated proteins, TOR controls how cells respond to nutrients, stress, and environmental signals, thereby influencing important processes such as protein synthesis and immune function. Given its central role in these fundamental cellular activities, it is not surprising that cancer, metabolic disorders, and age-related diseases are linked to TOR malfunction.
Despite being so ubiquitous in science and medicine, how rapamycin was discovered has remained largely unknown to the public. Many in the field know that scientists at the pharmaceutical company Ayerst Research Laboratories isolated the molecule from a soil sample containing the bacteria. Streptomyces hydroscopicus What is less known is that this soil sample was collected as part of a Canadian-led mission to Rapa Nui in 1964, called the Medical Expedition to Easter Island, or METEI.
As a scientist who built my career around rapamycin’s effects on cells, I felt compelled to understand and share the human story behind its origin. Learning about historian Jacalyn Duffin’s work on METEI completely changed the way I and many of my colleagues view our own field.
Unearthing the complex legacy of rapamycin raises important questions about systemic bias in biomedical research and what pharmaceutical companies owe to the indigenous lands from which they draw their blockbuster discoveries.
History of METEI
The Easter Island Medical Expedition was the brainchild of a Canadian team composed of surgeon Stanley Skoryna and bacteriologist Georges Nogrady. Their goal was to study how an isolated population adapted to environmental stress, and they believed that the planned construction of an international airport on Easter Island offered a unique opportunity. They assumed that the airport would lead to greater outside contact with the island’s population, leading to changes in their health and well-being.
With funding from the World Health Organization and logistical support from the Royal Canadian Navy, METEI arrived on Rapa Nui in December 1964. Over the course of three months, the team performed medical examinations on nearly all of the island’s 1,000 inhabitants, collecting biological samples and systematically examining the island’s flora and fauna.
It was as part of these efforts that Nogrady collected more than 200 soil samples, one of which ended up containing the strain of bacteria. Streptomyces producer of rapamycin.
It is important to realize that the main objective of the expedition was to study the Rapa Nui people as a kind of living laboratory. They encouraged participation through bribery by offering gifts, food, and supplies, and through coercion by recruiting a long-standing Franciscan priest on the island to assist in recruitment. While the researchers’ intentions may have been honorable, it is nevertheless an example of scientific colonialism, where a team of white researchers chooses to study a group of predominantly non-white subjects without their input, resulting in a power imbalance.
There was an inherent bias in the initiation of METEI. For one thing, researchers assumed that the Rapa Nui had been relatively isolated from the rest of the world when, in fact, there was a long history of interactions with countries outside the island, beginning with reports from the early 1700s to the late 1800s.
METEI also assumed that the Rapa Nui were genetically homogeneous, ignoring the island’s complex history of migration, slavery, and disease. For example, the modern population of Rapa Nui is mixed race, of Polynesian and South American ancestors. The population also included survivors of the African slave trade who were returned to the island and brought with them diseases, including smallpox.
This miscalculation undermined one of the key goals of METEI’s research: assessing how genetics affects disease risk. While the team published a number of studies describing the different fauna associated with Rapa Nui, their inability to develop a baseline is likely one of the reasons there was no follow-up study after the completion of the airport on Easter Island in 1967.
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Give credit where credit is due
The omissions in rapamycin’s origin stories reflect common ethical blind spots in the way scientific discoveries are remembered.
Georges Nogrady brought soil samples from Rapa Nui, one of which eventually reached Ayerst Research Laboratories. There, Surendra Sehgal and his team isolated what was called rapamycin, eventually bringing it to market in the late 1990s as the immunosuppressant Rapamune. While Sehgal’s persistence was key to keeping the project alive through corporate upheavals, even going so far as to hide a culture at home, neither Nogrady nor the METEI were credited in their historical publications.
Although rapamycin generated billions of dollars in revenue, the Rapa Nui people have not received any financial benefits to date. This raises questions about indigenous rights and biopiracy, which is the commercialization of indigenous knowledge.
Agreements such as the United Nations’ 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples aim to protect indigenous claims to biological resources by encouraging countries to obtain the consent and views of indigenous peoples and provide redress for potential harm before starting projects. However, these principles were not in effect during the time of METEI.
Some argue that because the bacteria that produces rapamycin has since been found elsewhere, Easter Island’s soil was not the only one essential to the discovery of the drug. Furthermore, because the islanders did not use rapamycin or even know of its presence on the island, some responded that it is not a resource that can be “stolen.”
However, the discovery of rapamycin on Rapa Nui laid the foundation for all subsequent research and commercialization around the molecule, and this only happened because people were the subjects of the study. Formally recognizing and educating the public about the essential role the Rapa Nui played in the eventual discovery of rapamycin is key to compensating them for their contributions.
In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry as a whole has begun to recognize the importance of fair compensation for indigenous contributions. Some companies have committed to reinvesting in communities where valuable natural products are obtained. However, for the Rapa Nui, the pharmaceutical companies that directly benefited from rapamycin have not yet made such recognition.
Ultimately, METEI is a story of both scientific triumph and social ambiguities. While the discovery of rapamycin has transformed medicine, the expedition’s impact on the Rapa Nui people is more complicated. I believe that the issues of biomedical consent, scientific colonialism, and overlooked contributions highlight the need for more critical examination and awareness of the legacy of groundbreaking scientific discoveries.
*Ted Powers is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Davis.
This article was originally published on The Conversation/Reuters
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