BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Two researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham are headed to the icy waters of Antarctica in their quest to find chemicals that may help battle diseases such as cancer.

Marine biologists James McClintock and Chuck Amsler, and six other team members, will leave this week for the National Science Foundation’s Palmer Station. The station – a laboratory and housing for up to 44 people – is on a peninsula that points toward the southern tip of South America.

They’ll be joined, figuratively, by schoolchildren and others who in coming weeks can track their adventure online through their blogs and photos.

Members of the team prepared this week for their dives in temperatures that dipped to about 30 degrees by practicing at Alabama Blue Water Adventures park in Pelham. While the winter water temperatures aren’t as cold – in the 50-degree range – as in Antarctica, the location allows them to practice with the more than 100 pounds of scuba gear, Amsler said.

Diving in the flooded quarry also is a good representation of the cliff-like terrain in the Antarctic waters, he said.

Not that they’ve never done the dives before. Amsler will be making his 300th dive into Antarctica’s waters during this year’s trip. McClintock has made up to 50 dives there, and this year he will be on the boat helping divers and watching out for leopard seals, which could be dangerous to divers.

McClintock and Bill Baker, a chemist at the University of South Florida who has been involved in the project, both have been recognized for their research in Antarctica by having land areas named for them at an inlet where McMurdo Station, the largest U.S. research station on the continent, is located.

Other team members from the University of Alabama at Birmingham this year include Amsler’s wife, Maggie Amsler, a veteran of 15 Antarctica trips who also is McClintock’s research assistant, and UAB graduate students Craig Aumack and Philip Bucolo, who will be making their first trips.

McClintock will stay until early April and Chuck Amsler until late May. Other team members will stay until June.

A team of biologists led by McClintock began making treks to Antarctica in 1989 to study the underwater ecology. Amsler, who studies marine plants, and Baker joined the team later. The team’s focus has evolved into looking at chemicals developed by organisms to fend off predators. The trips are funded with more than $100,000 a year from the National Science Foundation.

“The oceans represent this vast depository of biodiversity that if protected and preserved are essentially a cornucopia of potential drugs for mankind over the centuries to come,” McClintock said.

Most of the plants and sea creatures they’re looking for can be found in the waters just offshore from the station, Amsler said. Divers collect the sea creatures and plants and bring them back to the laboratory.

One thing researchers look at is which plant a creature will or won’t eat. If it won’t eat something, researchers try to figure out why. The plant or a creature may be too tough, it may not provide the nutrition the predator is seeking, or it may simply taste bad. If it tastes bad, it might have a chemical in its skin to keep it off predators’ menus, Amsler and McClintock said.

Antarctica has a number of plants and animals that have chemical defenses, and researchers are seeing whether there might be other uses for the compounds.

UAB’s Cystic Fibrosis Center, the National Cancer Institute and pharmaceutical companies routinely screen the compounds for potential drugs to fight diseases, including AIDS and cancer, McClintock said. The cancer institute screens them for effectiveness against 20 to 25 types of cancers, including prostate and breast cancers, he said.

So far, the compound that has created the most excitement is a chemical from sea squirts – transparent blobs of baseball-sized critters – that seems to be potent against several lines of skin cancer at low doses, McClintock said. Researchers named the compound Palmerolide.

Amsler and McClintock say six drug companies have shown an interest in developing the compound into a drug. It could be created synthetically, so there wouldn’t be a need to harvest sea squirts, McClintock said.

The compound is being patented by UAB, the University of South Florida, and the co-inventors – Amsler, McClintock, Baker and another USF researcher, Thushara Diyabalanage.

A possible drug is still several years away. In the meantime, UAB researchers will be looking for new possibilities.

During the coming trip, researchers will be looking at tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called amphipods that could be major predators of algae, sponges and tunicates.

Trekking all the way to Antarctica gives researchers a look at creatures that roam in a pristine environment that hasn’t changed in eons.

“We know we’re working in a community in which all the major players that have shaped the community evolutionarily are still there,” Amsler said.

On the Net: www.antarctica.uab.edu