Small in Size, Big in Impact: Marine Microbes, a Boon for Biotherapeutics

Due to re-emerging infections and multiple drug-resistant pathogens, scientists initiated the investigation of marine microbes for their anti-infective characteristics. About 70% of the Earth’s surface gets cover by the ocean, which is a vast habitat for marine microbes, and out of those few microbial classes endure only in the sea. The benefit with the marine microbes is that it fits in the traditional pharmaceutical “model,” so there is no need for the extra effort for drug extraction from them. The marine microbes secrete the secondary metabolites, having a variety of bioactivities. In the 1950s, two drugs (Ara-C as anticancer and Ara-A as antiviral) isolated from a shallow-water sponge of the Florida coast launched in the market for the first time opened the gate for the marine microbes as the promising source of new drugs. The marine microbes also produce nutritional supplements, for example, marine alga secretes the docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which is an essential unsaturated fatty acid of breast milk, and, nowadays, this is used in the formula milk of infants. The ocean should be explored more in search of novel marine drugs because the preclinical marine pharmacology pipeline is found to be very productive.