Tamara Rubilar had a fascination for sea creatures since she was a child and spent all her adult life studying them. But the Argentine marine biologist, based in Puerto Madryn, never imagined that this passion would one day help her save the life of her own son.

That, in turn, led her to create one of Patagonia’s most unusual biotechnology ventures: Erisea, a company producing dietary supplements derived from compounds found in sea urchins.

To understand her serendipitous story, one must go back almost 30 years, when Rubilar was 19 and decided to move from her native Buenos Aires to the southern province of Chubut to study biology.

“At the time, in Argentina, there was no marine biologist degree program. You had to study biology and then specialize. And Puerto Madryn had the only university in the country where you could specialize in marine biology,” she tells the Herald.

She made a life in Puerto Madryn, always tied to the sea. She met and married a diver, and together they had their first son, who was born in 2008, while she was undergoing her doctoral thesis.

She then worked as a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research’s (CONICET) marine sciences institute, where she focused on learning about the eating habits, reproduction cycles, and behavior of sea urchins.

Little did she know at that time that the information she recollected — with the aim of finding out if sea urchins were a good source of omega-3 fatty acids — would soon become invaluable to her personal life.

In 2012, she and her husband welcomed their second son, but they soon realized something was wrong with him.

“The doctors told us he suffered from a rare autoimmune disease,” she remembers. It triggered severe respiratory, skin and food allergies. 

The allergies caused his intestines to get so inflamed that they would bleed and were unable to absorb nutrients.

He also had a low white........

© Buenos Aires Herald