Nature's bounty - drug discovery from the sea.

With ∼ 40 years of research completed after the development of self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, drug discovery opportunities in the sea are still too numerous to count. Since the FDA approval of the direct-from-the-sea calcium channel blocker ziconotide, marine natural products have been validated as a source for new medicines. However, the demand for natural products is extremely high due to the development of high-throughput assays and this bottleneck has created the need for an intense focus on increasing the rate of isolating and elucidating the structures of new bioactive secondary metabolites. In addition to highlighting the drug discovery potential of the marine environment, this review discusses several of the pressing needs to increase the rate of drug discovery in marine natural products, and describes some of the work and new technologies that are contributing in this regard.