Bioprospecting

The development of drugs from marine organisms can be highly profitable. The extraction of arabinosides from the sponge, Tethya crypta, lead to more than $50 million annual sales in derived antiviral medicines. Pseudopterosins are a type of chemical with anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties which were discovered in a coral, Pseudoterigorgia elisabethae, in the Bahamas. Eventually a pure form was developed and is now used in Estee Lauder skin care products ' in 1995 pseudopterosin was among the University of California's top ten most valuable royalty generating inventions. Today it has an annual market value of $3-4 million.

However the cost and technical difficulties of identifying and collecting marine samples, especially those occurring beyond the limits of conventional diving, the sometimes lengthy and highly skilled laboratory processes, the occasional needs to develop new screening techniques and the difficulty associated in securing a sustainable source mean that high levels of investment are necessary. Japan spends almost a billion dollars a year, 80% of which comes from the private sector. Other countries spend far less but the search for new compounds, marine bioprospecting, is big business and is very likely to increase.

Sequencing of the total genomes of marine organisms is a rapidly advancing yet new area of bioprospecting research. The genome of two marine microorganisms, Methanoccus jannaschii and Vibrio cholerae, has been completed. The genome sequence of the round-spotted pufferfish is nearing completion and that of the zebrafish is 50% complete. Genetic screening will become a lot more important in the near future and will lead to the development of gene probes for antibiotics and other molecular targets.