DNA from wild organisms could save your life — but there’s a catch

Marine animals known as sea squirts, shown here, produce defense compounds that can damage cancer cells. Scientists have used them to produce anticancer drugs. | Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images

CALI, COLOMBIA — Stuck to rocks, shells, and piers in oceans around the world is a strange little creature called a sea squirt. It’s essentially a fleshy sack with two wide holes that it uses to suck in and expel seawater.

Sea squirts are special for a few reasons. They tend to shoot water out of their valves when you squeeze them. Plus, like oysters and clams, they help filter the ocean as they feed, keeping it clean. And remarkably, sea squirts also produce chemical compounds to defend themselves that have been shown to damage cancer cells. Scientists have used those compounds to develop drugs for patients with some kinds of soft-tissue cancer. 

Sea squirts are among an endless list of animals, plants, and microbes that stand to improve human lives. 

Researchers estimate that an astonishing 70 percent of antibiotics and cancer treatments in use today are rooted in natural organisms, from plants to snakes to sea sponges. The first medication to treat HIV came from a Caribbean sea sponge. The cosmetic drug Botox is derived from a bacterium. The enzyme used to stonewash jeans was originally derived from wild microbes in salt lakes in Kenya. 

Collectively, these natural derivatives, and the profits they generate for companies, are considered the benefits of a planet with healthy ecosystems. And maintaining these benefits is a key justification for protecting nature: It can literally save our lives.

But a key question that has long been a source of division among global environmental leaders is who, exactly, should reap those biodiversity benefits — the access to life-saving drugs, the money that nature generates, and so on.

There’s a long history of what some advocates and researchers call biopiracy: when companies make products, such as cosmetics or drugs, using organisms from poor nations or Indigenous communities and then don’t share the benefits back with them.

Until recently, the solution to this sort of exploitative innovation was, at least in theory, relatively straightforward. It’s a bit complex, but under a United Nations treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), countries can regulate access to plants and animals within their own borders. Should a company want to collect a medicinal plant from a foreign country, it may need to sign what’s called a benefit-sharing agreement with that country’s government. Under that agreement, the company can be required to compensate the country and its people in exchange for permission to take that plant.

But there’s an enormous loophole in this effort to prevent exploitation. 

Recent advances in biotechnology have made it easier than ever for scientists to digitally sequence and analyze the DNA of wild organisms — the genetic code that determines what properties a species possesses. These sequences often get uploaded to online databases that are free for anyone to use. And increasingly, researchers and companies use that genetic data, known as digital sequence information (DSI), to develop new products, such as vaccines.

What’s important here is that when companies use DSI, they don’t have to collect physical specimens from a country. It’s all online. And that makes the obligation to share benefits from whatever product they develop more complicated, even if the sequences originate from plants or animals in foreign regions.

This may all sound extremely obscure, but DSI is among the most important — and divisive — topics in the global movement to save nature. This week, government officials from nearly all countries are meeting in Cali, Colombia, at a major UN meeting on biodiversity known as COP16. Figuring out a plan to regulate DSI is at the top of the agenda. The idea is to create a new mechanism that would push companies that use DSI to fund conservation, especially in poorer parts of the world.

On one hand, such a plan seems impossible to put in place. Companies hold a tremendous amount of power and want fewer regulations, not more. But it could also be a massive opportunity. If developed nations and industries shared some of the money and knowledge that is derived from digital biodiversity data, it could be used to conserve nature in the places where it is most vital — and most at risk.

Who benefits from nature?

The debate and tensions around DSI are rooted in inequality. Put simply, rich nations have loads of scientific resources, whereas many poorer nations have loads of less-explored biodiversity. And up until now, the relationship between the two groups has been lopsided. 

Decades ago, a US pharmaceutical company developed anticancer drugs with the help of a plant from Madagascar called the rosy periwinkle; the company didn’t share its profits with the people of Madagascar. You can find similar stories with the antifungal spray Neemax, derived from a tree in India, and muscle relaxants made with compounds from curare, a group of poisonous plants from the Amazon.  

“Scientists from the global north have frequently extracted data and samples from the Global South without the permission of the people there, without collaborating meaningfully — if at all — with local scientists, and without providing any benefit to the countries where they conduct their work,” a team of researchers wrote earlier this year. 

Global environmental leaders recognized this problem decades ago. When they established the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, still the world’s most important biodiversity agreement, they made benefit-sharing one of three main goals of the treaty, along with conserving biodiversity and using it sustainably. Under the agreement, benefits derived from plants and animals should, at a minimum, be shared with the countries and local communities where that biodiversity is found — and especially with the groups who have safeguarded it, such as Indigenous communities.

Nearly two decades later, CBD made the requirements around benefit-sharing more concrete and enforceable through an agreement called the Nagoya Protocol, named after the Japanese city where it was adopted. The agreement essentially affirms that countries have the legal right to regulate access to physical plants, animals, and other elements of biodiversity within their borders. All countries are also supposed to make sure that any bits of biodiversity they — or their companies — use that come from other nations are collected with the consent of that country. 

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The protocol has, at best, a mixed record. Middle-income nations, like Brazil, or those with a lot of donor support, have established systems that work. In many poorer nations, however, access is still poorly regulated or unregulated. In general, very little money has flowed into countries via the Nagoya Protocol, said Marcel Jaspars, a professor at the University of Aberdeen and a leading expert on DSI in the Global North.

DSI only adds to these benefit-sharing woes. When environmental leaders crafted the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol, digital biodiversity data wasn’t as easily accessible or as useful as it is today; these agreements don’t even mention DSI. It’s widely understood that CBD and the protocol only pertain to physical materials — microbes, plants, compounds from a sea squirt — not genetic sequences. That leaves the use of DSI, now a massive source of scientific innovation, largely unregulated. 

What DSI is and how it works

DSI is one of the most complex concepts in the environmental world, but here’s the gist: After researchers collect plants, animals, and other organisms, they commonly sequence their DNA, or part of it, and upload that information online to a database. Those genetic sequences, in digital form, are DSI. The largest global collection of DNA and RNA sequences is (take a breath) the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. It houses billions of genetic sequences and is free for anyone to use.

Downloading the sequence data and using it to develop commercial products does not trigger the legal obligations under CBD that harnessing a biological sample would.

Scientists use DSI for a mind-bending array of projects. Consider the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. The company used nearly 300 genetic sequences, according to the patent, many of which were drawn from open-access databases, to produce the shot (which the company was able to design in just two days).

Researchers also use DSI to figure out how unique a particular genetic sequence might be, or what it might do — as in, what physical trait in an organism the sequence is linked to. This is incredibly valuable for the biotech and agriculture industries. A seed company, for example, might have a crop in their private collection that thrives without much water. They can sequence the plant’s DNA and cross-reference its genetic information with online databases, which often list information about the role of different sequences. Ultimately, this can help the company identify which particular sections of the plant’s genome might be associated with an ability to survive droughts, a valuable trait. Artificial intelligence, including projects like Google’s AlphaFold, makes these sorts of predictions even easier.

Conservation scientists also benefit from DSI in a big way. They increasingly rely on an approach called environmental DNA (eDNA) to catalog what species live in a particular area, such as a stream or the forest floor. Researchers will gather samples of water or soil and filter out bits of DNA that animals shed into the environment. Then they’ll look for a direct match with those sequences in open-access databases, revealing what those animals are. If the species are rare or otherwise considered important, this information could, say, help justify protecting a particular habitat. 

This is to say: DSI is useful! There’s a good reason it’s open to everyone. It both enables and speeds up research, some of which is literally life-saving.

Yet there’s also a cost.

The way DSI is managed today maintains inequities and furthers exploitation when the people who prosper from it are largely in wealthy economies, according to advocates for developing nations. (This problem is especially pronounced and worrying when it comes to developing vaccines.)

“DSI makes it possible to get all kinds of commercial advantages,” said Michael Halewood, an expert in genetic resource policy at CGIAR, a global agriculture organization. “That creates a big gap that needs to be closed. We all agree on the inequities of the situation. What’s a sensible way to close that gap without undermining science?”

What a plan to regulate DSI might look like

The UN COP16 biodiversity conference is now underway. And one of the main goals of this year’s event — which is scheduled to wrap up on November 1 — is to come up with a plan to regulate DSI.

Negotiations are a bit of mess. There’s a lack of trust between wealthy and poor nations and as conversations continue this week, there are still many unanswered questions, leading to an enormous amount of uncertainty about how this digital data might be regulated on a global scale. 

But consensus has grown around the idea that industries that rely heavily on DSI should pay into a fund that supports conservation and development, especially in the Global South. This opens up two big questions: Who, exactly, pays to use DSI? And who ultimately receives those payments?

At this point, it’s likely that large corporations in sectors like pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and agriculture will be strongly encouraged to funnel a small percent of their profits or revenue into a new fund. That fund will then divvy up the money to countries or specific projects to protect nature. The agreement may also require that a portion of that money goes toward Indigenous people and local communities, groups widely considered among the most effective conservationists.

Ahead of COP16, the corporate sector expressed serious concerns about this collective-fund approach. Different companies use vastly different quantities of DSI, according to Daphne Yong-D’Hervé, who leads global policy at the International Chamber of Commerce. And generally speaking, trying to regulate DSI as separate from physical materials is problematic, Yong-D’Hervé told Vox last month. Organisms and their genetic sequences are often used collectively during R&D. 

Ultimately, she said, corporations want a simple system to use DSI that gives them a license to operate worldwide — without paying too much, of course. “Businesses support the principle of benefit sharing, but this has to be implemented in a way which is aligned with scientific and business realities, is simple, and does not discourage investments in research and innovation,” Yong-D’Hervé told Vox.

Negotiators are also bickering about a number of other issues, including who should manage the DSI fund and whether the CBD should create and manage a new database of genetic sequences. Most existing databases are hosted by organizations in developed nations, so poorer countries have little control over how they operate, said Nithin Ramakrishnan, a senior researcher at Third World Network (TWN), a group that advocates for human rights and benefit sharing.

Databases that store DSI need to make it clearer where sequences come from and who uses them, he said. “We are asking for accountability,” Ramakrishnan said.

Do these negotiations really matter?

Although the CBD is a legally binding treaty, any mechanism to regulate DSI — technically referred to as a “decision” — won’t be, experts say. So at best, companies will be strongly encouraged to chip in, though they won’t face legal action if they don’t (unless they operate in a country with its own DSI laws).

Also not helping: The US, the world’s premier scientific and economic power, is not a member of the CBD, due to resistance from conservative lawmakers. That means it can’t formally participate in these COP16 negotiations and will have even less pressure to abide by any DSI mechanism. (However, some of the big US pharmaceutical companies have told Jaspars they are “open to sharing benefits.”)

That’s partly why any DSI mechanism is unlikely to generate enormous sums of money. Experts estimate that the potential windfall will be under $10 billion a year. The gap in funding for conservation worldwide, meanwhile, is around $700 billion a year.

Yet there’s plenty of value in managing DSI, beyond just money.

The agreement is almost certain to encourage industries to share other benefits stemming from genetic data, including information and access to medicines. More important is what these conversations signal: that humans benefit from biodiversity, in its most rudimentary form, and perhaps it’s time to give some of those benefits back to the environment and its strongest caretakers.

“The wonders of biodiversity are being used to make our human lives better,” said Amber Scholz, a scientist at Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a German research organization. “And the question is, should the planet get a cut?”

Update, October 28 10:30 am ET: This story was originally published on September 20 and has been updated with new information stemming from the ongoing COP16 negotiations in Cali, Colombia.