The ocean pharmacy: A treasure chest of new drug leads

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, the pharmaceutical industry has seen a decrease in discovery and success based on computational and combinatorial chemistry, and an increase in base costs imposed by increasing regulatory requirements and a higher rate of failures during the development process1. Couple this to the potential of structural, hence intellectual property overlap between libraries of synthetic compounds and the need for low-cost, scalable and chemically unique new scaffolds, the pharmaceutical industry is starting to re-evaluate the potential of natural products to provide the industry with new drug leads.