Bringing new products from marine microorganisms to the market

Abstract

The seas provide huge untapped reserves of microbial diversity and potentially useful bioactive molecules, yet their exploitation comes with many challenges as a product is brought to market. The requirements for bringing a product to market depend very much on the type of product, type of market and to some extent, geographical location of that market. Each product will face unique problems, but several themes are recurrent. These include: the need to develop a commercially viable means of production, the need to scale production to meet the demands of the market either through subcontracting or construction of production facilities, verification of the performance and safety of the product to the standards of the relevant regulatory bodies, ensuring customer acceptance of the product through market research and marketing, and above all, finding the finance to support all of these. Clearly, with such a wide variety of potential products to consider, from raw biomass, secreted products, extracts and concentrates all the way up to purified molecules, and potential markets as different as green chemistry and pharmaceuticals, it is impossible to cover all permutations but many of the challenges, while differing in the details, are surprisingly common.