For many patients, even the best and most costly therapies extend
survival at best by only a few months. Moreover, it is expensive and
patients could spend easily 10,000 USD per month for a prolonged
period. Therefore, continued efforts are urgently needed to identify
promising new therapies that are at lower cost and could treat cancer.
Marine environment provides an ocean of opportunities.
Hundreds of thousands of natural compounds have been discovered
for a variety of uses, with over 100,000 from plants alone. In
contrast, in the past three decades, over 2,000 marine-derived
compounds have shown a wide range of application (Hu et al., 2015).
The medicine cabinet may seem like a mysterious treasure trove of
pills that cure innumerable pains and sicknesses, but the power behind
many of our most common and important medicinal drugs comes from
nature. Cold-curing Sudafed comes from compounds in the Ephedra sinica
plant, pain-relieving aspirin originates from willow bark, and the
remarkable antibacterial properties of penicillin were discovered in
Penicillium mold. By looking at marine organisms we can access a whole
new suite of potential compounds that are from organisms that have
undergone completely different evolutionary pressures over time, so we
can find a whole suite of things in the ocean that we never even
dreamed of. Some of which could hold the complex secrets to cures for
cancers and other diseases.
