U. biologist honored for drug research

Baldomero "Toto" Olivera — a University of Utah biologist who seeks new medications from the toxins of poisonous cone snails — won one of medicine's top honors Monday when he was named as a new member of the Institute of Medicine.

At least 30 other present or former U. researchers have been elected to membership in at least one of three groups under the umbrella of the National Academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.

Olivera is a distinguished professor of biology. He is one of 65 new members and five foreign associates elected to the Institute of Medicine — Olivera's second big honor this year. In April, he won a four-year, $1 million award as one of 20 new "Million-Dollar Professors" named by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Olivera grew up in the Philippines, where cone snails were sold in seafood markets and where fishermen occasionally were stung by the snails and killed by their venom. Cone snails harpoon fish with a needle-like tooth, injecting toxic venom to the nervous system, paralyzing fish so they can be reeled in and eaten. Olivera and members of his lab have identified several promising drug candidates in the snails' nerve poisons.

The natural form of Prialt — a drug for severe pain approved in 2004 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — was discovered in Olivera's lab in 1979 by J. Michael McIntosh, then an incoming freshman at the U. and now a professor of psychiatry and research professor of biology. The drug was isolated from the fish-hunting cone snail Conus magus, or magician's cone, which is only 1.5 inches long and thus too small to kill people it stings.