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Drug Discovery from Marine Microbes

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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.

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Acknowledgments

Research in the author’s laboratory is supported by NIH grants CA100851, TW006634, CA108874, and NS053398. We thank an anonymous reviewer for the helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA

    William H. Gerwick & Amanda M. Fenner

  2. Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA

    William H. Gerwick

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  1. William H. Gerwick
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  2. Amanda M. Fenner
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Correspondence to William H. Gerwick.

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Gerwick, W.H., Fenner, A.M. Drug Discovery from Marine Microbes. Microb Ecol 65, 800–806 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-012-0169-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-012-0169-9

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