Drug discovery from marine microbes

Abstract

The marine environment has been a source of more than 20,000 inspirational natural products discovered over the past 50 years. From these efforts, 9 approved drugs and 12 current clinical trial agents have been discovered, either as natural products or as molecules inspired from the natural product structure. To a significant degree, these have come from collections of marine invertebrates largely obtained from shallow-water tropical ecosystems. However, there is a growing recognition that marine invertebrates are oftentimes populated with enormous quantities of "associated" or symbiotic microorganisms and that microorganisms are the true metabolic sources of these most valuable of marine natural products. Also, because of the inherently multidisciplinary nature of this field, a high degree of innovation is characteristic of marine natural product drug discovery efforts.

Fig 1

Pie charts showing a) the collected sources of the 21 marine derived or inspired agents in the clinic or clinical trial, presently or recently, and b) the same agents with their demonstrated or predicted metabolic sources

Fig 2

Marine natural products and/or their clinically useful derivatives.

Fig 3

A spectral network of a marine cyanobacterial extract displaying many distinct natural products grouped into clusters which reveal their chemical relatedness