Abstract
Marine ecosystems contain over 80% of the world’s biodiversity, and many of these organisms have evolved unique adaptations enabling survival in diverse and challenging environments. The biodiversity within the world’s oceans is a virtually untapped resource for the isolation and development of novel compounds, treatments, and solutions to combat human disease. In particular, while over half of our anti-cancer drugs are derived from natural sources, almost all of these are from terrestrial ecosystems. Yet, even from the limited analyses to date, a number of marine-derived anti-cancer compounds have been approved for clinical use, and several others are currently in clinical trials. Here, we review the current suite of marine-derived anti-cancer drugs, with a focus on how these compounds act upon the hallmarks of cancer. We highlight potential marine environments and species that could yield compounds with unique mechanisms. Continued exploration of marine environments, along with the characterization and screening of their inhabitants for unique bioactive chemicals, could prove fruitful in the hunt for novel anti-cancer therapies.
Highlights
Cancer is a disease found in most multicellular organisms (Aktipis et al, 2015)
While a number of reviews have exhaustively cataloged the suite of marine natural products with anti-cancer activity, we focus here on the cancer hallmarks as a framework to understand the spectrum of anti-cancer activity from marine-derived sources
Inhibiting Cyclins and Cyclin-Dependent Kinases One marine-derived compound with known anti-cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) activity is fucoidan
Summary
Cancer is a disease found in most multicellular organisms (Aktipis et al, 2015). In addition to the potential bias in assays used, it is likely that many marine-derived compounds evolved to be toxins (Haefner, 2003), which may explain the increased representation of agents that target cell death pathways. All of these tested compounds target the resisting cell death cancer hallmark.
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