Drugs from the sea: harvesting the results of aeons of chemical evolution.

Despite the recent development of combinatorial chemistry for the rapid generation of thousands of new chemicals, the pharmaceutical industry still looks to the natural environment to uncover novel compounds that extend the boundaries of our chemical imagination. The terrestrial environment has been mined for such compounds for many years with great success. Now the world's oceans are beginning to yield hidden treasures. Many of these chemicals are structurally complex, stretching the prowess of modern organic chemists to their limits as they attempt to mimic the synthetic versatility of nature. In the future, these marine compounds are likely to yield entirely new classes of drugs that will be a valuable contribution to our ability to treat human disease.