Out Of Its Shell
Substance found in shells may have 'limitless'future.
A  Newsday article reprinted by permission
Newsday,   Inc., Copyright,   1995
September  26,   1995

By Thomas Maicr
STAFF WRITER   ':
IN YOUR FINGERTIPS if you're human. And if you're a butterfly, it's in your wings. .'But mostly the crunchy natural substance called chitin/pronounced KITE-in) is found in heaps of broken lobster shells, tossed-out crabs and other discarded creatures of the deep. On Long Is-' land, the shorelines are littered with it.
Increasingly, scientists, biotech companies and government experts believe they can use chitin — basically, sugar-molecules that help hold seashells together — to perform modem-day alchemy.
When processed, scientists said, chitin can serve a variety of roles: It is a natural polymer that easily binds with other materials; it can help stimulate extra plant production, increasing crop yields; it has been shown to alleviate digestive and cholesterol problems in animal studies; it can stimulate the body's healing mechanisms; and — last but not least, scientists say — it can be used to treat-sewage and purify water.
"Chitin has been the focus of a dramatic increase in academic study during the past twenty years," said John Vournakia, a biologist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. "But academic research is very different from getting products off the ground."

In fact, a number of universities and the U.S. government - as part of its $45 million Sea Grant -research program — have worked on chitin and-developed more than 200 patents for its use. But so far, the chitin revolution has yet to take place for reasons that range from the usual birth pains of an emerging biotech industry struggling to get attention in a world seemingly crammed full of emerg-     ing industries to 'the normal regulatory problems even the richest of pharmaceutical companies face in getting their products into drug stores.
To harvest chitin, researchers usually place         the remains of crabs, lobsters and, sometimes, shrimp, into large vats, where they are cooked and processed to dissolve the shells' calcium carbonate and remove the protein component. This process, in which about seven tons of crab shells, for example, yield one ton of the fina] product, leaves behind chitin as a white pow: der.
The process was developed by the late Dr. Paul Austin, a chemist at the University of Delaware, more than a decade ago.
Colleagues affectionately refer to Austin.as the 'father of chitin' and recall how he came up with the right mix of solvents to extract powdery chitin from blue crabs and other crustaceans.
That powder — made up of a string of

Please see CHITIN on Page B30

CHITIN from Page B25
ordinary sugar molecules linked together to form a larger, more complex, plasticlike molecule known as a polymer — can then be further processed into an natural, edible film that has many properties similar to plastic, scientists say.
And that, scientists say, is why they've been experimenting with chitin as a way to wrap fruits and vegetables, keeping out moisture to increase shelf life. Although this has increased shelf life for strawberries by five days, it remains a question whether consumers will accept eating the fruit, covering and all, according to researchers and the International Commission on Natural Health Products, the fledgling industry trade group.
Chitin offers other agricultural pluses as well, scientists say. In Washington State, for instance, agriculturalist Donald Freepons has reported a 10 percent to 15 percent increase in rice yields when he sprayed chitosan, a chitin product, on rice seeds before planting. Recently, he's tried the same approach with wheat.
"It looks similar to ordinary wheat, but there are ten percent more heads on the stalk," Freepons said.
Like other researchers working with chitin, Freepons isn't sure why this is happening. But he theorizes that chitin somehow makes genes within a plant's reproductive system act more aggressively-
Freepons plans more chitin testing on other crops, like tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes. "I think the movement in chitin is just starting," he added. "The range of possibilities is limitless in increasing yields and doing so environmentally without more chemicals."
Scientists are also looking beyond plants, at how chitin might ultimately be used to help in human health care.
In studies at North Carolina State University and other places, scientists have added chitin to the diet of rats and rabbits and found that it helped reduce digestive problems by stimulating beneficial bacteria in the intestines, and also im-

proved blood cholesterol levels.
Additionally, Dr. Gregory Borah, chief of plastic surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., said he's found that compounds made from chitosan helped bones and skin burns heal more quickly and effectively.
"There's a lot of exciting potential from this," Borah said. He said chitin, as a natural substance, shows few signs of body rejection. "If you put this material under the skin, or next to the bone, it has no negative response."
Borah said chitosan — a substance made by placing chitin into a solution of concentrated sodium hydroxide and heating it — somehow attracts

white blood cells, called macrophages, to the bone. These macrophages act as messenger chemicals to develop immature bone cells into strong bone.
Borah and other experts theorize that chitin's effectiveness as a healer comes from its natural chemical makeup as a "long, charged polymer."
The chitosan contains a strong positive charge, they said, which forms a film on negatively charged surfaces like hair and skin, helping it to bind with fats and cholesterol in the body that naturally help to reduce the incidence of scar tissue.
But all of this, of course, will have to wait until the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives it approval for widespread use. Even though chitin is a natural substance, Borah said that the FDA's governmental process probably will take years.

costing as much as $100 million in preliminary testing. And currently, he said, there really is no deep-pocketed pharmaceutical sponsor supporting chitin research.
In Japan and Europe, however, that's not true. There, experts say, chitin is already being woven into wound dressings by several companies.
To help develop chitin's potential, the federal government has sponsored several academic studies through its $45 million Sea Grant program, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There is a big area of concentration to find alternative uses for products from the seas," said Carolyn Levi, who works in the Sea Grant program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Right now, the most widespread practical use for chitin is for treating sewage wastewater.
Experts say that small, magnetic beads of chitosan, when placed into sewage, can help sop up heavy metals like lead and cadmium and some organic chemicals. The metal-soaked residue is later shipped off for safe disposal. This is an ideal solution, scientists say, because chitin is nonpolluting and will degrade quickly in industrial landfills.
Susan Murcott, an environmental engineer at MIT, says the success of chitin in sewage treatment has prompted a new look at using chitin to purify drinking water. It relies essentially on the same method — adding chitosan to the water — which causes impurities to clump together and then sink to the bottom of treatment tanks to be processed.
"We're looking to see if chitin can be used in places like Boston and New York City, which have surface water from reservoirs that requires expensive treatment," Murcott said.
Meanwhile, most researchers agree that developing a thirst among consumers for chitin-based products isn't going to be easy. They ^ say there's already been a long "learning curve" in finding new uses.
As a pioneer in this fledgling industry, Dr. Sam Hudson, an associate professor of chemistry at North Carolina State University, has come up with film, fibers and chitosan-filled cotton. But because