Drug from Marine Sampling to Factory

The marine world expresses a great scope for diverse novel scaffolds with unusual skeleton nature. Polyphenols, phycocolloids, pigments, fucoidans, peptides, pigments, and phlorotannins are the main classes of compounds provided by marine resources. Some of these structures displayed astonishing biological activities and successfully proceeded to marketed drugs for the treatment of different human diseases. There are many examples of successful commercially available marine-derived drugs such as cytarabine (Cytosar-U®) for acute myelocytic leukemia, trabectedin (Yondelis®) for ovarian cancer, Eribulin (Halaven®) for metastatic breast cancer, Ziconotide (Prialt®) for severe chronic pain, and Vidarabine (Ara-A) for viral infections. Oceans and their immense biodiversity have gifted humanity with a pathway out of the obstacles of health care. The constant need for innovation has been a great challenge for the pharmaceutical industry especially in finding new sources of active compounds. This chapter discussed the clinically approved marine-derived compounds and their impact on different diseases, focusing on those with granted approval in the last decade from 2011 to 2021. We also highlighted the underlying mechanism of actions through in vivo, in vitro, and computational in silico studies. Hopefully, this chapter will help scientists to develop a novel marine-derived drug.

Keywords: Marine, Phycocolloids, Fucoidans, Cytarabine, Leukemia, Vidarabine, Pharmaceutical Drugs, Natural Products (NPs).