Challenges and Emerging Strategies in Marine Natural Product Discovery and Drug Development

Abstract

Marine natural products provide a unique source for pharmaceutical applications to treat patients with serious diseases, owing to diverse chemical scaffolds that endow them with novel modes of action. During the research and development of marine medicines, the discovery of bioactive compounds from marine origins is a predominant process, and the scale-up production of drug candidates bridges the gap for the transformation of leads to clinical application. Marine natural products from hit to clinical application involve multiple steps. This review intends to outline the approaches for the research and development of marine drugs, including chemoecology-based selection of unexplored marine organisms leading to search metabolites with structural novelty and potential bioeffects, molecular networking for targeted isolation of marine natural products, developed techniques facilitating a chemical and bioactivity-oriented discovery of bioactive natural products as drug candidates, sequencing microbial genomes revealing the biosynthetic capacity and activating silent gene clusters, and strategies to overcome the limited supply of bioactive compounds from marine organisms.