“The reason the vents are so interesting is that they are the most extreme environment on the planet,” Lutz said. “These organisms have been isolated from the rest of the world and are in environments that are highly carcinogenic. The question is, are there compounds associated with them that are able to serve as anticancer agents?” Recently, Lutz and his colleagues began to investigate the potential for the development of drugs from compounds found in deep-sea vents in earnest. Since the early 1990s, they have collaborated with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in a project in which they match their found organisms with maintained cancer cell lines within the NCI database.