Historical story on natural medicinal chemistry: Drugs from ocean / 中草药

ABSTRACT

Unlike terrestrial organisms, marine organisms have to adapt to extreme marine environmental conditions, and to acclimatize to these conditions, marine organisms possess unique characteristics that differentiate from terrestrial organisms in many aspects, such as metabolism. And this led to marine organisms often produce unique secondary metabolites that have not been observed in terrestrial organisms. Diversity of marine natural products has played a fundamental role in biomedical research and drug development during the last decades, either directly as drugs or as leading compounds that were further optimized by medicinal chemists. From these efforts, 10 approved drugs and dozen current clinical trial agents have been discovered, either as natural products or molecules inspired from the natural product structure. This paper summarized the new drugs developed from marine organisms. This is one of the series papers about "historical story on natural medicinal chemistry".