From a sea hare to global clinics

Abstract

The pioneering research we directed at evaluating a broad selection of marine organisms from diverse ocean areas in 1965 forward has certainly helped accelerate interest in exploring marine microorganisms, invertebrates, and vertebrates as new sources of improved drugs for a great variety of indications. Even now, less than 0.5 percent of the marine animals, for example, have received even a cursory effort to detect antineoplastic constituents. Thus, the most important marine animal and microorganism anticancer drugs still await discovery. Furthermore, these natural products are a result of 3.8 billion years of evolutionary biosynthetic organic reactions aimed at even more specific molecular design and targeting. The net result of these trillions and trillions of biologically directed organic reactions (biosynthetic combinatorial processes) is an astronomical number of candidates for use as anticancer drugs and as drugs necessary across most medical indications. But they need to be discovered and developed to the clinic. Our research group has been very fortunate to detect anticancer drug candidates in a variety of marine invertebrates and microorganisms.