Drug Discovery in the 21st Century

The oceans continue to provide new opportunities for the discovery of marine-derived medicines. Increased sophistication in the tools available to explore the deep sea has expanded the habitats that can be sampled and has greatly improved the opportunities for discovery of new species and the chemical compounds they produce. In addition, as our understanding of the biochemistry behind a variety of diseases improves, better methods have been developed for rapidly determining the biomedical potential of the metabolites produced by marine organisms. The Division of Biomedical Marine Research (DBMR) is ideally poised to take advantage of these opportunities in our drug discovery program. In addition, the Division enters the millennium prepared to develop and apply state-of-the-art techniques in molecular biology and microbial genomics to discover and produce novel chemicals with therapeutic potential.