Marine drugs development and social implication

Abstract

Marine sources have attracted much attention as potential sources for natural products over recent years. The future of the biopharmaceutical holds great promise due to the many compounds that have and will be isolated from marine sources. Marine organisms have long been recognized as a source of novel metabolites with applications in human disease therapy. The marine environment is a rich source of both biological and chemical diversity, where it has been reported that oceans contain nearly 300,000 described species, representing only a small percentage of the total number of species that have to be discovered. The ocean represents a rich resource for ever more novel compounds with great potential as pharmaceutical, nutritional supplements, cosmetics, agrichemicals and enzymes, where each of these marine bioproducts has a strong potential market value. The reasons for the strong showing of drug discovery from natural products can be attributed to the diverse structures, intricate carbon skeletons, and the ease that human bodies will accept these molecules with minimal manipulation. With new pressures from the public and governments around the world to develop products to combat diseases and infections commonly encountered, new chemical entities need to be found and developed. Today, the structures of around 1,40,000 secondary metabolites have been elucidated. But, owing to technical improvements in screening programmes, and separation and isolation techniques, the number of natural compounds discovered exceeds one million. This paper deals with the sources of drugs, discovery, isolation, identification, strain improvement, and its socio economic problems from marine sources. Detailed accounts are also given on novel marine metabolites, which were isolated from different (sponges, fishes, mollusks, cones, seaweeds and microorganisms) sources. Apart from that, we covered the role of natural products in disease treatment and commercial utilization of these compounds for possible drug improvement using advanced (metabolic engineering, post-genomics) approaches. The main challenge for future new drugs from the sea remains supply, but with production by fermentation and aquaculture two promising solutions are presented.